Long ago, Carella thought. All of it long ago.
Meeting Augusta Blair — or so all the guys in the squadroom had thought at the time — was perhaps the best thing that ever could have happened to Kling. He’d been investigating a burglary — victim came home from a ski trip to find the apartment a shambles — and there she was, auburn-haired and green-eyed, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life. Augusta Blair. Whose face and figure only adorned every fashion magazine in America. How could a detective/2nd earning only $24,600 a year even hope to ask a famous fashion model for a date? Nine months later, he told Carella he was thinking of marrying her.
“Yeah?” Carella said, surprised.
“Yeah,” Kling said, and nodded.
They were in an unmarked police car, heading for the next state. It was bitterly cold outside. The windows, except for the windshield, were entirely covered with rime. Carella busied himself with the heater.
“What do you think?” Kling asked.
“Well, I don’t know. Do you think she’ll say yes?”
“Oh, yeah, I think she’ll say yes.”
“Well then, ask her.”
“Well,” Kling said, and fell silent.
They had come through the tollbooth. Behind them, Isola thrust its jagged peaks and minarets into a leaden sky. Ahead, the terrain consisted of rolling, smoke-colored hills through which the road snaked its lazy way. As it turned out, Kling’s doubts had largely to do with whether or not the relationship he then enjoyed with Augusta would somehow change once they were married. He finally got around to asking Carella why he himself had got married. Carella thought it over for a long while. Then he said, “Because I couldn’t bear the thought of any other man ever touching Teddy.”
And in the long run, that was what had ended the marriage between Kling and Augusta, wasn’t it? Another man touching her? Not so long ago, that. No. Only last August. This was now February, and Kling had found his wife in bed with another man only last August, and had almost killed that man, but had hurled his gun away before he’d fired it. The divorce had been simple and clean. Augusta needed no alimony and wanted none from him; she had always earned more than three times what he did, anyway. They had split their possessions equally down the middle. It was Kling who’d moved out of the apartment they’d once shared. It was Kling who’d found a new apartment downtown, almost at the opposite end of the city, almost as though he wanted to put as much geographical distance between them as was humanly possible. It was Kling who’d carted all his possessions downtown with him, his clothes, his share of the records and books — and his guns. He owned two guns. They were both .38 caliber Police Specials. He preferred carrying the one with the burn mark on the walnut stock, and kept the other one only as a spare. It was the guns that bothered Carella.
He had never seen Kling this despondent, not even after the senseless murder of Claire Townsend in that bookshop. He had talked Byrnes into offering Kling two weeks’ vacation immediately after the divorce was final, even though Kling wasn’t up for another vacation till the summertime. Kling had refused the offer. He had invited Kling to several dinner parties at the Riverhead house. Kling had turned down the invitations. He had tried to work out his schedule so that he and Kling were partnered more often than any other two men on the squad, so that he could talk to Kling, help him through this bad time the way he had helped him through all the other bad times. But Kling had learned of the maneuver and had asked that he be put on “floater” status, filling in for whoever was off sick or in court or on vacation or whatever. Carella now believed that Kling was deliberately trying to avoid him, and only because he was a painful reminder of what had happened; he had, after all, been the first person to whom Kling had confided his suspicions.
Tomorrow was Valentine’s Day — well, today, actually; the bedside clock read 1:30 in the morning. Holidays, even minor-league ones, were a bad time for anyone who’d lost a partner through death or divorce. Carella felt there was a fifty-fifty chance the lieutenant would give him the extra man he and Meyer desperately needed. So, all right, if the lieutenant did say okay, then why not zero in on Kling, tell the lieutenant Kling was the only man who could properly help them track down all those 114 names on the company list, and then question a third of those people, and eliminate the ones who couldn’t possibly have killed either Sally Anderson or Paco Lopez — damn it, where was the connection?
He fell asleep thinking that even if the lieutenant did assign Kling as a triple, the job would take them forever. He did not know that at that very moment the case was about to take a turn that would bring Kling into it, anyway, and would furthermore obviate the urgent need for questioning all those 114 people.
The man was wearing under his overcoat a plaid jacket, gray flannel slacks, and a vest. He was also wearing a .32 caliber pistol in a holster on the left-hand side of his body. The overcoat button closest to his waist was unbuttoned so that he could reach in for a clean, right-handed draw if ever the need arose. He had never had to use the pistol since he’d got the carry permit for it, six years ago.
He should not have worked so late tonight.
When he’d closed his shop downtown, and then rolled down the metal grille and fastened the padlock in place, bolting the protective grille to the sidewalk, there had not been another soul anywhere on the street. He had walked quickly and nervously to the all-night garage where he normally parked his car, grateful for the gun at his waist. In the empty hours of the morning, the midtown area of this city turned into something resembling a moonscape. He had driven steadily uptown, stopping at each red light, nervously anticipating a sudden attack from any of the denizens who were abroad. When finally he entered the Grover Park transverse road, he felt a bit more secure; he would only have to stop at two traffic lights inside the park itself (if, in fact, they were red when he approached them) and a possible third one when he came out of the park farther uptown on Grover Avenue. He caught the first of the lights and waited impatiently for it to change. The next one was green. The one at the end of the exit ramp was also green; he made his right turn onto Grover Avenue, drove uptown for several blocks, past the police station with its green globes flanking the front doorstep, the numerals 87 on each globe, and continued driving for another three blocks uptown before he made a left turn and headed north for Silvermine Road. He parked the car in the garage under his building, the way he always did, locking it and then heading for the elevator at the far end of the garage. It occurred to him, each and every time he parked the car under the building, that the security guard at the front door upstairs wasn’t of very much use down here. But the distance from his assigned parking space to the red door of the elevator was perhaps fifty feet, if that, and rarely did he get home later than 7:00 P.M., when there were a great many other tenants coming and going.