“What’d you do?” Eileen asked.
She was really interested now. She had never come up against a woman wielding a dangerous weapon, her line of specialty being men, of sorts. Usually she leveled her gun at a would-be rapist’s privates, figuring she’d threaten him where he lived. Tonight, she had rammed the gun into the hollow of the man’s throat. The barrel of the gun had left a bruise there, she had seen the bruise when she was putting the cuffs on him. But how do you begin taking a knife away from an angry woman? You couldn’t threaten to shoot her in the balls, could you?
“I walked over to her and I said, ‘Grace, that’s a mighty fine knife you’ve got there, I wonder if you’d mind giving it to me.’ ”
“That was a mistake,” Eileen said. “She might’ve given it to you, all right, she might’ve really given it to you.”
“But she didn’t,” Willis said. “Instead, she turned to the guy who’d run out of the bar—”
“The ‘Police, police’ guy?”
“Yeah, and she said, ‘Harry,’ or whatever the hell his name was, ‘Harry, how can you keep cheating on me this way?’ and then she burst into tears and handed the knife to the bartender instead of to me, and Harry took her in his arms—”
“Excuse me, huh?” Kling said, and got up from behind the desk, and walked out of the squadroom.
“Oh, God,” Willis said.
“Huh?” Eileen said.
“I forgot,” Willis said. “He probably thinks I told that story on purpose. I’d better go talk to him. Excuse me, okay? I’m sorry, Eileen, excuse me.”
“Sure,” she said, puzzled, and watched while Willis went through the gate in the slatted rail divider and down the corridor after Kling. There were some things she would never in a million years understand about the guys who worked up here. Never. She picked up another slice of pizza. It was cold. And she hadn’t even got a chance to tell anyone about how absolutely brilliant and courageous and deadly forceful she’d been in that Laundromat.
And whenever he couldn’t sleep, Carella found himself thinking about Kling. Found himself wondering what Kling was doing at that moment. And to keep his mind off Kling, he started thinking about the case again, whichever case it happened to be, there was always some case or other he was working, some case or other that was driving him slowly crazy. And when he couldn’t find an opening in the case, when he’d poked and pried and shaken the damn thing trying to find that one seam in the fabric that he could tear open with his hands — let some light in, climb in there inside the case, find out what the hell was making the case tick — when the case refused to yield he began thinking about Kling again, wondering about Kling, hoping that Kling would not decide to eat his own gun one night.
It was a possibility.
It was more than a remote possibility.
Carella had been a detective/2nd for several years already before he’d met Kling — well, really met him; before that, he’d known him as a patrolman, but only to say hello to. When Kling got promoted into the squadroom (youngest man on the team back then) Carella took an immediate liking to him, and recognized at once that his boyish good looks and quiet manner could be a tremendous asset to anyone partnered with him. Nor was he thinking only of your garden-variety Mutt-and-Jeff situations, where any cop in the world would be happy to play the heavy to Kling’s apple-cheeked softie. It went beyond that. It involved something like a basic decency that civilians could sense, a decency that encouraged them to open up in his presence where they might not have to another cop.
It was easy to allow this precinct to burn you out. When you dealt with it day and night, it could get to you. All the ideals you’d come in with, the lofty notions about maintaining law and order, preserving society, all of it seemed to fade deeper and deeper into an innocent past as you came to grips with what it was really all about, when you realized it was a war you were fighting out there, the good guys versus the bad guys, and in a war you got tired, man, in a war you burned out.
So, yes, the police work had left its mark on Kling, too; only a man like Andy Parker could remain unfazed by police work, and the way he remained unfazed was by abdicating it. Parker was the worst cop in the precinct, perhaps the worst one in the entire city. Parker’s credo was a simple one: you can’t drown if you don’t go in the water. Maybe Parker had once been young and idealistic. If so, Carella hadn’t known him then. All he saw now was a man who never went in the water. The police work had touched Kling the way it had touched them all, but it wasn’t the police work that made Carella worry he would eat his gun one night, it was the women, the way Kling kept having such bad luck with women.
Carella had been with him that first time, in the bookshop on Culver Avenue, when Kling had knelt beside a dead girl wearing what appeared to be a red blouse, and had winced when he’d seen the two enormous bullet holes in the girl’s side, the blood pouring steadily from those wounds, staining her white blouse a bright red. Kling had reached down to lift from the dead girl’s face a book that had fallen from one of the shelves and lay tented over it, her broken string of pearls scattered on the floor like tiny luminescent islands in the sticky coagulation of her blood, his hand reaching out to lift the book, to reveal the girl’s face, and then he’d whispered, “Oh, my Jesus Christ!” and something in his voice caused Carella to run toward the back of the shop at once. And then he heard Kling’s cry, a single sharp anguished cry that pierced the dust-filled, cordite-stinking air of the shop.
“Claire!”
He was holding the dead girl in his arms when Carella reached him. His hands and his face were covered with Claire Townsend’s blood, his fiancée’s blood, and he kissed her lifeless eyes and her nose and her throat, and he kept murmuring over and over again, “Claire, Claire,” and Carella would remember that name and the sound of Kling’s voice as long as he lived.
And he would remember, too, the kind of cop Kling became — or almost became — after her murder. He thought they’d lose him then. He thought Kling would go the way of the Andy Parkers of the world, if indeed he remained a cop at all. Lieutenant Byrnes had wanted to transfer him out of the Eight-Seven. Byrnes was normally a patient and understanding man, who could appreciate the reasons for Kling’s behavior, but this in no way made Kling any nicer to have around the office. The way Byrnes figured it, psychology was certainly an important factor in police work because it helped you to recognize there were no longer any villains in the world, there were only disturbed people. It was a very nice tool to possess, psychology was, until a cheap thief kicked you in the groin one night. It then became somewhat difficult to imagine the thief as a put-upon soul who’d had a shabby childhood. In much the same way, though Byrnes completely understood the trauma that had been responsible for Kling’s behavior (God, how many years ago was this? Carella wondered), he nonetheless was finding it more and more difficult to accept Kling as anything but a cop who was going to hell with himself.
He had not gone to hell with himself.
Not that time nor the time afterward, either, when the girl he’d begun dating and eventually living with decided to dump him once and for all on a Christmas Eve, which was not a particularly good time to finally and irrevocably end a relationship, especially if later that night you were forced to shoot somebody dead, which was just what happened with Kling on that Christmas Eve, the man lunging across the room toward him, Kling squeezing the trigger once, and then again, aiming for the man’s trunk, both slugs catching him in the chest, one of them going directly through his heart and the other piercing his left lung. Kling had lowered the gun. He remained sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, and watched the man’s blood oozing into the sawdust, and wiped the sweat from his lip, and blinked and then began crying.