Hail to the Chief

'Why'd you get married?'

Carella thought for a long time. Then he said, 'Because I couldn't bear the thought of any other man ever touching Teddy.'

Kling nodded.

He said nothing more all the way to Turman.

The detective's name was Al Grundy. He first took them to the hospital mortuary to show them the girl's body, and then he drove them out to where the corpse had been found. The initial discovery had been made by two teen-age boys cutting through the woods on their way to school. One of them had stayed with the dead girl, nervously waiting some ten feet from where the body lay partially covered with leaves that had fallen in October and were now moldering and wet. The other had raced to the nearest pay telephone and called the police, who responded within four minutes. There were tire tracks in the wet leaves, and it was assumed that the body had been transported to this isolated glade from someplace else.

'Think it's the girl you're looking for?' Grundy asked.

He was a huge black-haired man with light-blue eyes, freckles spattered across the bridge of his nose. He could not have been older than twenty-five or -six. Standing beside him, Kling suddenly felt ancient, suddenly felt it was time he did get married, and had kids, and became a grandfather.

'Maybe,' Carella said. 'Have you got a last name for her? Was she carrying any identification?'

'Nothing but the locket on her wrist.'

'No handbag?'

'Nothing.'

'Any houses nearby?'

'Just the one over the knoll there. Doubt if anyone could've seen anything from there. Because of the way the ground slopes.'

'The road we came in on, is that the only access road?'

'Yeah. Route 14. We traced the tire tracks back to where they must've drove in,' Grundy said. 'The mud and the leaves made that easy. But there's nothing on the road itself that would indicate which direction they came from.'

'What about the kids who found her? Have you talked to them?'

'Oh, yeah. They're clean, I think. You never can tell, but these kids had two things going for them: one, they called the cops, and two, they both looked scared shitless.'

'What'd the coroner have to say about the time of death?'

'Set it at sometime between ten and twelve P.M. last night. She'd been beaten badly, bleeding welts across her back, looked like somebody whipped her before cutting her throat. No sexual assault. Vaginal vault is clean of semen.'

'Mind if we talk to the people in the house up there?'

'Be my guest,' Grundy said.

The 'people' in the house up there turned out to be only one person. His name was Rodney Sack, and he was seventy-six years old, and he appeared very frightened by the appearance of detectives in his kitchen. He was just sitting down to breakfast, and was wearing blue denim coveralls, a wool plaid sports shirt, a blue cardigan sweater threadbare at the elbows, and a hearing aid. The hearing aid did not help matters much. His obvious fear made matters even worse.

The detectives were trying to find out exactly who 'Midge' was. They had gone through Broughan's gang files quite thoroughly, and had found no such nickname for any girl-auxiliary member. The scrutiny had not been a simple one; there were records of 153 gangs in West Riverhead alone. The Scarlet Avengers and the Death's Heads had been involved in hostile combat with many of those gangs since their respective formations three and four years back. Picking out the gang that had decided to do in the leaders of the Avengers and the Heads was rather like picking a dish at a Chinese banquet: everything looked good. So far, the detectives had only two leads. They knew that Andrew Kingsley had been with Eduardo and Constantina Portoles for some time before a person or persons unknown had entered the apartment and killed all three of them. They did not know why Kingsley had been there, or what his relationship with Portoles and his sister had been. They also knew that a girl named Midge, presumably an auxiliary member of the rampaging gang, had supplied them with information, and then had turned up in the next state, two days later, with her throat slit But who the hell was Midge?

'Notice any unusual traffic in the woods down there last night?' Carella asked Sack.

'No, sir,' Sack said, visibly trembling.

'Any headlights or anything?'

'What would red lights be doing down there in—'

'Headlights. Headlights. Automobile headlights.'

'Oh, headlights,' Sack said. 'No, didn't see no headlights down there.' He tried to light his pipe, and the match fell from his shaking hand. He took another wooden match from the box of kitchen matches, and broke the match striking it. He looked up at the detectives, smiled weakly, and put the pipe aside.

'What are you scared of Mr. Sack?' Kling asked.

'Me? Nothing. What've I got to be scared of?'

'Did you see something down in those woods last night?'

'No, sir, I did not.'

'Where were you last night, Mr. Sack?' Carella said, and realized that both he and Kling were shouting at the old man. Carella's wife was a deaf-mute, and he never thought of her inability to hear or speak as an affliction. But Sack's partial deafness was inordinately irritating. Carella suddenly realized that most people were annoyed by the partially deaf, whereas their patience was normally quite generous toward the partially blind, or the crippled. He put the thought aside, certain he would discuss it later with Teddy, her eyes watching his lips intently, her fingers answering in the deaf-mute language they shared, and which he 'spoke' fluently and with a distinctive accent all his own. Sack was staring up at him. He was not sure the old man had heard him. 'Mr. Sack, where were you…?'

'I heard you, I heard you," Sack said impatiently, and Carella now saw the other side of the coin, the annoyance of the hard-of-hearing at being subjected to shouting and repetition and constant doubt as to whether they heard what was being said to them.

'Well, where were you?'

'Here.'

'All night?'

'All night, yes.'

'What were you doing between ten o'clock and midnight?'

'Sleeping.'

'What time did you go to bed?'

'Nine o'clock. I go to bed nine o'clock every night.'

'Hear anything unusual down there in the woods?' Kling asked.

'I'm hard of hearing,' Sack said with great dignity. 'I wouldn't have heard a cannon if it went off on the porch.'

'Did you get out of bed any time during the night?'

'Well, yes, I suppose so.'

'When?'

'Don't remember exactly when. Had to go to the toilet, so I got out of bed.'

'Where's the toilet?' Carella asked.

'Back of the house.'

'Overlooking the woods?'

'Yes.'

'Is there a window in the toilet?'

'Yes.'

'Did you look out that window while you were in there?'

'Don't recall as I did.'

'Try to recall,' Kling said.

'I suppose I might've glanced out there.'

'What'd you see?'

'The woods.'

'Anything in the woods?'

'Trees, bushes.' Sack shrugged.

'Anything else?'

'Animals maybe. Lots of deer come close to the house, foraging.'

'Did you see any animals last night?'

'Well, yes, I suppose so.'

'What kind of animals?'

'Well, hard to say. Pretty dark out there except for the…' Sack stopped in midsentence.

'Except for the what?' Carella said.

'Porch light,' Sack said. 'Always keep the porch light on.'

'By the porch, do you mean that porch on the front of the house?'