“Barbara,” the man said, “I brought you some more flowers.”
In the police sedan, Carella said, “I don’t get it, Bert. I just don’t get it.”
“What’s the trouble?” Kling asked.
“No trouble. Only confusion. We find a pair of hands, and the blood group is identified as ‘O,’ right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Mike Chirapadano is in that blood group. He’s also a big guy, and he vanished last month, and so that would make him a good prospect for the victim, am I right?”
“Right,” Kling said.
“Okay. But when we find the clothes the murderer was wearing, it turns out they belonged to Mike Chirapadano. So it turns out that he’s a good prospect for the murderer, too.”
“Yeah?” Kling said.
“Yeah. Then we get a line on Bubbles Caesar’s hideout, the place she and Chirapadano used, the place we’re going to right now—”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah; and it turns out the phone is listed for Charles Tudor, Bubbles’s agent. Now how does that figure?”
“There’s 1611 up ahead,” Kling said.
Standing in the hallway, Hawes could hear only the man’s voice, and the voice definitely belonged to Charles Tudor. He wondered whether or not he should crash the apartment. Scarcely daring to breathe, trying desperately to hear the girl’s replies, he kept his ear glued to the wood of the door, listening.
“Do you like the flowers, Barbara?” Tudor said.
There was a pause. Hawes listened, but could hear no reply.
“I didn’t know whether or not you liked gardenias, but we have so many of the others in here. Well, a beautiful woman should have lots of flowers.”
Another pause.
“You do like gardenias?” Tudor said. “Good. You look beautiful today, Barbara. Beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking so beautiful. Did I tell you about the police?”
Hawes listened for the reply. He thought instantly of Marla Phillips’s tiny voice, and he wondered if all big girls were naturally endowed with the same voices. He could not hear a word.
“You don’t want to hear about the police?” Tudor said. “Well, they came to see me again yesterday. Asking about you and me. And Mike. And asking whether or not I owned a black raincoat and umbrella. I told them I didn’t. That’s the truth, Barbara. I really don’t own a black raincoat, and I’ve never liked umbrellas. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me. I’m a very complex person. But we have lots of time. You can learn all about me. You look so lovely. Do you mind my telling you how beautiful you look?”
This time, Hawes heard something.
But the sound had come from behind him, in the hallway.
He whirled, drawing his.38 instantly.
“Put up the gun, Cotton,” Carella whispered.
“Man, you scared the hell out of me!” Hawes whispered back. He peered past Carella, saw Kling standing there behind him.
“Tudor in there?” Carella asked.
“Yeah. He’s with the girl.”
“Bubbles?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, let’s break it open,” Carella said.
Kling took up a position to the right of the door, Hawes to the left. Carella braced himself and kicked in the lock. The door swung open. They burst into the room with their guns in their hands, and they saw Charles Tudor on his knees at one end of the room. And then they saw what was behind Tudor, and each of the men separately felt identical waves of shock and terror and pity, and Carella knew at once that they would not need their guns.
18
The room was filled with flowers. Bouquets of red roses and white roses and yellow roses, smaller bouquets of violets, long-stemmed gladioli, carnations, gardenias, rhododendron leaves in waterfilled vases. The room was filled with the aroma of flowers — fresh flowers and dying flowers, flowers that were new, and flowers that had lost their bloom. The room was filled with the overwhelming scent of flowers and the overwhelming stench of something else.
The girl, Bubbles Caesar, lay quite still on the table around which the flowers were massed. Her black hair trailed behind her head, her long body was clad only in a nightgown, her slender hands were crossed over her bosom. A ruby necklace circled her throat. She lay on the table and stared at the ceiling, and she saw nothing, because she was stone cold dead and she’d been that way for a month and her decomposing body stank to high heaven.
Tudor, on his knees, turned to look at the detectives.
“So you found us,” he said quietly.
“Get up, Tudor.”
“You found us,” he repeated. He looked at the dead girl again. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he asked of no one. “I’ve never known anyone as beautiful as she.”
In the closet, they found the body of a man. He was wearing only his undershorts. Both of his hands had been amputated.
The man was Mike Chirapadano.
Oh, he knew that she was dead; he knew that he had killed them both. They stood around him in the squadroom, and they asked their questions in hushed voices because it was all over now and, killer or not, Charles Tudor was a human being, a man who had loved. Not a cheap thief, and not a punk, only a murderer who had loved. But yes, he knew she was dead. Yes, he knew that. Yes, he knew he had killed her, killed them both. He knew.
And yet, as he talked, as he answered the almost whispered questions of the detectives, it seemed he did not know, it seemed he wandered from the cruel reality of murder to another world, a world where Barbara Cesare was still alive and laughing. He crossed the boundary line into this other world with facility, and then recrossed it to reality, and then lost it again until there were no boundaries any more, there was only a man wandering between two alien lands, a native of neither, a stranger to both.
“When they called me from the club,” he said, “when Randy Simms called me from the club, I didn’t know what to think. Barbara was usually very reliable. So I called her apartment, the one she shared with the other girls, and I spoke to one of her roommates, and the roommate told me she hadn’t seen her since early that morning. This was the twelfth, February twelfth; I’ll remember that day as long as I live, it was the day I killed Barbara.”
“What did you do after you spoke to the roommate, Mr. Tudor?”
“I figured perhaps she’d gone to the other apartment, the one on Canopy Street.”
“Were you paying for that apartment, Mr. Tudor?”
“Yes. Yes, I was. Yes. But it was our apartment, you know. We shared it. We share a lot of things, Barbara and I. We like to do a lot of things together. I have tickets for a show next week. A musical. She likes music. We’ll see that together. We do a lot of things together.”
The detectives stood in a silent knot around him. Carella cleared his throat.
“Did you go to the apartment, Mr. Tudor? The one on Canopy Street?”
“Yes, I did. I got there sometime around ten o’clock. In the night. It was nighttime. And I went right upstairs, and I used my key, and I... well, she was there. With this man. This man was touching her. In our apartment. Barbara was in our apartment with another man.” Tudor shook his head. “She shouldn’t do things like that. She knows I love her. I bought her a ruby necklace for Valentine’s Day. Did you see the necklace? It’s quite beautiful. She wears it very well.”
“What did you do when you found them, Mr. Tudor?”
“I... I was shocked. I... I... I wanted to know. She... she told me I didn’t own her. She told me she was free, she said nobody owned her, not me, not... not the man she was with and... and... and not Karl either, she said, not Karl, I didn’t even know who Karl was. She... she said she had promised this Karl she’d go away with him, but he didn’t own her either, nobody owned her, she said, and... and—”