Now, safe and sound, and smiling at the desk sergeant, the courier asked in his singsong tongue if there was a Detective Stephen Carella here. Murchison took the slender cardboard envelope, signed for it, and sent it
upstairs.
The packet was indeed addressed to Carella, the words detective STEPHEN LOUIS CARELLA scrawled across the little insert slip, and below that the address of the precinct house on Grover Avenue. He pulled on a
pair of latex gloves, ripped open the tab along the top end of the stiff envelope, and found inside a white business-size envelope with his name handwritten across it again,
DETECTIVE STEPHEN LOUIS CARELLA. He Opened
this smaller envelope, and pulled from it a plain white sheet of paper upon which were the typewritten words:
WHO'S IT, ETC?
A DARN SOFT GIRL?
O, THERE'S A HOT HINT!
'Who's it from?' Meyer asked, walking over.
'Dunno,' Carella said, and turned the packet over in his hands. The return name on the delivery insert, in the same handwriting as Carella's scribbled name, was ADAM fen. The return address was for a post office box at the Abernathy Station downtown.
'Anybody you know?' Meyer asked.
'Nope,' Carella said, and looked at the note again.
WHO'S IT, ETC?
A DARN SOFT GIRL?
O, THERE'S A HOT HINT!
'He spelled oh wrong,' Genero said. 'Didn't he?' he asked, not certain anymore. He had walked into the squad-room as part of the relieving night-shift team, and was now at Carella's desk, peering at the two envelopes and the note. 'Isn't oh supposed to be spelled with an h?'
'It's sexier without the h,' Parker said.
He, too, had just walked in as part of the relieving team. All in all, there were now six detectives crowded around Carella's desk, all of them looking at what he'd just received by same-day delivery. Cotton Hawes, all
suffused with heat from his conversation with Honey Blair, had to agree that o was sexier than oh, even if he couldn't say exactly why. Detective Richard Genero was still pondering the exact spelling of the word oh, when Hal Willis suggested that perhaps Adam Fen was an Irishman, a 'fen' being an Irish bog or marsh . . .
'. . . or swamp or something like that, isn't it?' he
asked.
. . . and the Irish sometimes waxing a bit romantic, which might account for dropping the h in the word oh, confirming Genero's lucky surmise.
Kling had already gone home, so he didn't have any opinion at all. Eileen Burke was just coming through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squad-room from the corridor outside. She hadn't yet seen the stuff on Carella's desk, so she didn't have an opinion, either. As yet.
Meyer was remembering that Monoghan — or Monroe, or one or the other of them - had remarked earlier today that the dead woman on the bedroom floor of the Silvermine Oval apartment was 'zaftig,' which in Yiddish meant 'juicy' or 'succulent,' but which in everyday English slang meant 'having a full or shapely figure,' which Meyer supposed could be translated as 'a darn soft girl.' He hesitated before mentioning this aloud because he knew in his heart of hearts that Detective Andy Parker was at best a closet anti-Semite and he didn't want to introduce religious conflict into what seemed to be a mere note from a possible homicidal nut named Adam Fen. But the coincidence seemed too rare not to have specific meaning.
'You know,' he said, 'the word zaftig And Carella immediately nodded and said, 'Gloria Stanford.'
'You think there's a connection?'
'Some crazy trying to tell us he did it?'
'Did what?' Parker asked. 'And what the hell is zaftig?'
'A darn soft girl,' Meyer said.
'Is that some kind of sexist remark?' Eileen asked.
Unlike the female detectives she saw on television, Eileen was not wearing a tight sweater. Instead, she had on an olive-green pants suit that complemented her red hair and green eyes. On every cop television show, at least one of the leading characters was a female detective. Sometimes, you had two or three female detectives in the same squadroom. Sometimes, even the lieutenant in command of the squad was a woman. In Eileen's experience, this was total bullshit. Of the eighteen detectives on the 87th Squad, she was the only woman.
'We caught a shooting death this morning,' Meyer explained.
'Beautiful woman.'
'Gloria Stanford.'
'Two in the chest.'
'So is this a written confession?' Genero asked hopefully.
'Oh, there's a hot hint!' Parker said, and rolled his eyes.
'Where's the Abernathy Station?' Willis asked.
'Downtown near the Arena,' Hawes said.
'Should be easy to check that P.O. box.'
'You don't think Mr. Fen here would give us a real address, do you?' Parker asked.
'What's the name of that courier service?' Hawes asked.
Carella turned the envelope over again.
'Lightning Delivery.'
'Shy and unassuming,' Eileen said.
'Modest, too.' Willis agreed.
'Fen sounds Chinese to me,' Genero said. 'Like Moo Goo Gai Fen.'
They all looked at him.
'No, Fen is American,' Parker said. 'There was once an actor named Fen Parker, no relation. Played Daniel Boone on TV.'
'That was Fess Parker,' Hawes said. Parker shrugged.
'Anyway,' Genero said, nodding in agreement with himself, 'Adam Fen is most definitely Chinese. Adam is a popular name in Hong Kong.'
'How do you happen to know that?' Parker asked. 'It's common knowledge,' Genero said. Willis almost sighed. He turned to the three detectives who were now fifteen minutes late getting relieved. Go home,' he told them. 'We'll get on this shit.' He tapped the courier envelope. 'Maybe we'll learn something.'
'Mazeltov,' Meyer said.
'Which means what? Parker asked, making it sound like a challenge.
'Which means "good luck,'" Carella said. He had no expectation that either Lightning Delivery or the Abernathy Station would provide any clue to Adam Fen. He was right.
3.
IT WOULD SEEM ODD that in this vast and bustling metropolis, in the mightiest nation on earth, a message from someone intent on mischief could enter a police station unchallenged. After the anthrax mailings — and what with Homeland Security and all — one might have thought that a barrier of screening machines would have been erected at the portals of every police station in the country. Nay.
In the good old days (ah, the good old days) whenever you were in trouble, you ran right into a police station, any police station, past the hanging green globes flanking the wooden entrance doors, and you rushed to the desk sergeant and yelled, 'I've been raped!' 'I've been robbed!' 'I've been mugged!' and somebody would take care of you. Nowadays, there was a uniformed cop standing guard at the entrance, and he asked you to state your business and show some ID before he let you inside. This was still the big bad city and a great many choices were available to you. 'I've been stabbed, I've been axed, I've been shot in the foot!' But he wouldn't let you inside there unless he felt you had legitimate business with the police.
Well, a same-day, courier-service messenger certainly has legitimate business with the police if he's delivering a letter. Besides, what are you supposed to do? Examine each and every letter in his pouch? Impossible. In fact, what you do is you say, 'How goes it today, Mac?' and you let him in. Same way you let in the courier from Lightning Delivery yesterday, whom you also called 'Mac' even though you didn't know him from Adam.
Adam Fen was the return name on the letter the messenger carried to the muster desk at six-thirty that Wednesday morning, the second day of June. The letter was once again addressed to Detective Stephen Louis Carella. Sergeant Murchison asked an officer to take the letter upstairs.