a Diet Coke." So he says, "I order my non-alcoholic beer from my liquor supplier. And I can't sell it to customers to take home." So I said, "Who can you sell it to if not customers?" He says, "What?" So I say, "If you can't sell it to customers, who can you sell it to? Employees?" So he says, "I can't sell it to anyone. I would lose my liquor license." So I say, "This is not liquor! This is nonalcoholic!" And he says, "I'm sorry, sir.'"
'So did you get the beer or not?'
'I did not get it. And it wasn't beer. It was non-alcoholic beer.'
'Which you don't need, anyway, a diet.'
'Forget it,' Monoghan said, sighing, and a voice from the entrance door said, 'Good morning, people. Who's in charge here?'
The ME had arrived.
Detectives Meyer and Carella were just a heartbeat behind him.
YOU COULDN'T MISTAKE them for anything but cops.
Monoghan and Monroe might have been confused with portly pallbearers at a gangland funeral, but Meyer and Carella — although they didn't look at all alike -could be nothing but cops.
Detective Meyer Meyer was some six feet tall, a broad-shouldered man with china-blue eyes and a completely bald head. Even without the Isola PD shield hanging around his neck and dangling onto his chest, even with his sometimes GQ look — on this bright May morning, he was wearing brown corduroy slacks, brown socks and loafers, and a brown leather jacket zipped up over a tan linen shirt — his walk, his stance, his very air of confident command warned the
criminal world at large that here stood the bona fide Man.
Like his partner, Detective Stephen Louis Carella exuded the same sense of offhand authority. About the same height as Meyer, give or take an inch or so, dark-haired and dark-eyed, wearing on this late spring day gray slacks, blue socks, black loafers, and a blue blazer over a lime-green Tommy Hilfiger shirt, he came striding into the room like an athlete, which he was not — unless you counted stickball as a kid growing up in Riverhead. He was already looking around as he came in just a step behind both Meyer and the Medical Examiner, who was either Carl Blaney or Paul Blaney, Carella didn't know which just yet; the men were twins, and they both worked for the Coroner's Office.
In answer to Blaney's question, Monroe said, 'We were in charge until this very instant, Paul, but now that the super sleuths of the Eight-Seven
'It's Carl,' Blaney said.
'Oh, I beg your parmigiana,' Monroe said, and made a slight bow from the waist. 'In any event, the case is now in the capable hands of Detectives Meyer and Carella, of whose company I am sure you already have had the pleasure.'
'Hello, Steve,' Blaney said. 'Meyer.'
Carella nodded. He had just looked down at the body of the dead woman. As always, a short sharp stab, almost of pain, knifed him between the eyes. He was looking death in the face yet another time. And the only word that accompanied the recognition was senseless,
'Nice jugs, huh, Doc?' Monoghan remarked.
'Great jugs,' Monroe corrected.
'Either way, a zaftig woman,' Monoghan said.
Blaney said nothing. He was kneeling beside the dead
woman, his thumb and forefinger spreading her eyelids wide, his own violet-colored eyes studying her pupils. A few moments later, he declared her dead, said the probable cause of death was gunshot wounds, and ventured the wild guess that the lady had been shot twice in the heart.
Same words the handyman had used.
The lady.
THE HANDYMAN TOLD them the lady's name was Gloria Stanford. He told Meyer and Carella what he'd already told the Homicide dicks. He'd come up to change a washer in the kitchen faucet and had found the lady dead on the bedroom floor.
'What were you doing in the bedroom?' Meyer wanted to know.
'Senor?'
'If you came up to change a washer in the kitchen, what were you doing in the bedroom?'
'I alwayss check the apar'menn, make sure anybody's
home.'
'So you went into the bedroom to see if the lady was in there, is that right?'
'Si. Before I begin work.'
'And what if the lady'd been in bed or something?' Meyer asked.
'Oh no. It wass eleven o'clock. She hass to be gone by
then, no?'
'Then why'd you go look in the bedroom for her?' 'To see if she wass there,' the handyman said, and
shrugged elaborately.
'This guy sounds like my Chinese manager,' Monoghan
said.
'What'd you do when you found her in here dead?' Carella asked.
'I run down get the super.'
'He's the one called it in,' Monroe said. 'The super.'
'Where is he now?'
'You got me. Probably hiding in the basement, keeping his nose clean.'
The boys from the mobile crime lab were just arriving.
It was going to be a long day.
ALONG ABOUT THREE-THIRTY every afternoon, the squadroom's often frantic boil dissipated, to be replaced by a more relaxed ambience. The shift would be relieved in fifteen minutes, and usually all the clerical odds and ends were tied up by now. This was a time to unwind, to relax a little before heading home. This was a time to enter the mental decompression chamber that separated the often ugly aspects of police work from the more civilized world of family and friends.
Meyer and Carella had jointly composed the Detective Division report on Gloria Stanford, the woman who'd been found dead this morning in a fourteenth-floor apartment on Silvermine Oval, an area that passed for the precinct's Gold Coast. One copy of this DD report would go to Homicide, another would go to the Chief of Detectives, and the third would be filed here. Meyer was on the phone with his wife, Sarah, discussing the bar mitzvah of his nephew Irwin's second son — my how the time does fly when you're having a good time; it seemed like only yesterday that they'd attended Irwin the Vermin's own bar mitzvah. But Irwin was a grown man now — albeit a lawyer, so perhaps the sobriquet still applied.
Carella was on the phone with his sister, Angela. She had just told him he was a cad. Not in those words, exactly. What she'd actually said was 'Sometimes you behave like a spoiled brat.' This from his kid sister. Not such a kid anymore, either. All grown up, divorced once, and about to marry the district attorney who'd let their father's killer escape justice. Or so it seemed to Carella. Which was probably why his sister expressed the opinion that he sometimes behaved like a spoiled brat.
1 don't know what you're talking about,' he said into the phone, unconsciously lowering his voice to a whisper because a squadroom was not particularly the most private place in the world.
'What you said to Mama,' Angela said. She was referring to dinner at their mother's house yesterday. Carella felt like telling her that what had made that Memorial Day memorable for a woman named Gloria Stanford was getting shot twice in the chest, with both bullets passing through her heart, and that this morning, he had looked down into that woman's dead eyes, staring up at him wide open before the ME gently lowered her lids. He wanted to tell her that it had been a long, tiring day, and that he had just finished typing up the details of the case, and was ready to call home to tell Teddy he'd be on the way in fifteen — he glanced up at the wall clock - make that thirteen minutes, and he didn't need a scolding just now from his kid sister, was what he felt like telling her.
Instead, he said, 'I told Mama I was very happy. In fact, I told both of you . . .'
'It was your tone,' Angela said. 'My what?'
'The tone of your voice.'
'I meant what I said. I'm very happy Mama is getting married so soon after Papa got killed, and I'm very happy you're ..."