“Anybody down here when you arrived?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody?” Kling said. “Who called it in? Who found the body?”
“Don’t know, sir,” the patrolman said. “Dispatcher radioed us a Ten-Ten — investigate shots fired. We didn’t even know where we were supposed to look, they just gave us the address. So we asked the guy in the lobby, the security guard there, did he call 911 to report a man with a gun, and he said no, he didn’t. So we looked around the building and also the backyard, and we were about to call it back as a Ten-Ninety, when Benny here, he says, ‘Let’s check out the garage under the building.’ By that time, Charlie Car was here—”
“We’d been checking out an alarm on Ainsley,” one of the other patrolmen said.
“So the three of us come down here together,” the first patrolman said.
“And there he is,” the third patrolman said, nodding toward the body on the floor.
“Has Homicide been informed?” Kling asked.
“I guess so,” the first patrolman said.
“What do you mean, you guess so?”
“I gave it to the desk sergeant as a DOA. It ain’t my responsibility to inform Homicide.”
“Who’s talkin’ about Homicide behind our backs?” a voice from the top of the ramp said.
“Speak of the devil,” Brown said.
It was rare that Homicide detectives — or any detectives, for that matter — worked as triples, but the three men who came down the ramp now, advancing as steadily as Sherman tanks, were known throughout the city as the Holy Trinity, and it was rumored that they never did anything except as a trio. Their names were Hardigan, Hanrahan, and Mandelbaum. It occurred to Brown that he had never learned their first names. It further occurred to him that he had never learned the first name of any Homicide detective. Did Homicide detectives have first names? The three detectives were all wearing black. Homicide detectives in this city favored black. There was a rumor afoot that the stylistic trend had been started years back by a very famous Homicide dick. Brown’s surmise was a much simpler one: Homicide cops dealt exclusively with corpses; they were only wearing the colors of mourning. It occurred to him that Genero had begun wearing a lot of black lately; was Genero hoping for a transfer to Homicide? It further occurred to him that nobody in the squadroom ever called Genero by his first name, which was Richard. It was always, “Come here, Genero” or — more likely — “Go away, Genero.” Occasionally, he was called Genero the Asshole, the way an ancient king might have been dubbed affectionately Amos the Simple or Herman the Rat. If Homicide cops had no first names, and if Genero had a first name no one ever used, then perhaps Genero might one day enjoy a successful career with the Homicide Division. Brown devoutly hoped so.
“This here the victim here?” Hardigan asked.
“No, this here is a paper doily here,” Brown said.
“I forgot I was dealing with the Eight-Seven,” Hardigan said.
“Comedians,” Hanrahan said.
“Morons,” Mandelbaum said. “Two o’clock in the morning.”
“We get you out of your little beddie?” Brown asked.
“Shove it up your ass,” Mandelbaum said pleasantly.
“In spades,” Hardigan said, and Brown wondered if he was making a racist remark.
“Who is he?” Hanrahan asked.
“We haven’t tossed him yet,” Kling said.
“So do it,” Hanrahan said.
“Not until the ME’s finished with him.”
“Who says?”
“New regs — only a year old already.”
“Hell with the regs, we’ll freeze out here waiting for the ME here. This is Saturday night, you know how many people are getting themselves killed out there tonight?”
“How many?” Kling said.
“Toss him. Do what I tell you. This is Homicide here,” Hanrahan said.
“Put it in writing,” Kling said. “That I should toss him before the ME pronounces him dead.”
“You can see he’s dead, can’t you? What do you need? The man’s got no face left, why do you need an ME to tell you he’s dead?” Hardigan said, backing his partner.
“Then you toss him,” Brown said, backing his partner.
“Okay, we’ll wait for the ME, okay?” Hanrahan said.
“We’ll freeze down here waiting for the ME, okay?” Mandelbaum said.
“Will that make you guys happy?” Hardigan said.
Neither Brown nor Kling answered.
The ME did not arrive until almost 3:00 A.M. By that time the Mobile Crime Unit was on the scene doing everything they could do without touching the body itself. The boys from the Photo Unit were taking their pictures, and the CRIME SCENE signs were up, and Brown and Kling were making their drawings, and everybody was freezing to death but nobody had yet come to pronounce the stiff (very literally stiff) dead. The ME made a grand entrance, striding down the ramp like a stand-up burlesque comic ready to pitch popcorn and prizes.
“Sorry to be late, gentlemen,” he said, and Hardigan farted.
The ME bent over the corpse. He unbuttoned the corpse’s overcoat. The first thing all of them saw was the corpse’s hand clutched around the butt of a pistol in a holster.
“Well, well,” Hanrahan said.
With some difficulty, the ME unbuttoned the man’s plaid jacket. He was about to slide his stethoscope under the man’s vest and then under his shirt and onto his chest, the better to determine that the bullets pumped into his face had caused his heart to cease functioning, when he noticed — as did the five detectives and the three patrolmen and the photographer and the two lab technicians — that the man’s vest had perhaps a dozen pockets sewn into it.
“Last time I saw that was on a pickpocket,” Mandelbaum said. “Had all these pockets on his vest, used to drop stolen goods in them.”
The man was not a pickpocket.
Not unless he’d been very fortunate that day.
As soon as the ME was finished with him (and he was indeed dead), they went through all those little pockets sewn into his vest. And in each one of those little pockets, they found little plastic packets. And in each one of those little plastic packets, they found diamonds of various sizes and shapes.
“The guy’s a walking jewelry store,” Hardigan said.
“Only he ain’t walking no more,” Hanrahan said.
“Look at all that ice, willya?” Mandelbaum said.
7
They had promised only snow, but by morning the snow had changed to sleet and then to freezing rain, and the streets were dangerously slick. Carella almost slipped on his way to the subway, catching his balance a moment before he flew into the air. His mother had told him two atrocity stories when he was a child, and both of them had remained with him into his adult years. The first had to do with his Uncle Charlie, whom he’d never met, who had accidentally blinded himself in one eye with the point of a scissors while trying to trim his eyebrows. Carella occasionally had his eyebrows trimmed in a barber shop, but never did he attempt that dangerous task himself. His mother had also told him how his Uncle Salvatore had slipped on the ice outside his haberdashery in Calm’s Point, and landed on his back, which was why he was confined to a wheelchair. Whenever Carella spotted a patch of ice on a sidewalk or a road, he walked or drove over it very, very carefully.
Carella had known (and incidentally had loved) his Uncle Salvatore, and whenever his uncle asked him why he didn’t wear a hat, Carella felt a bit guilty. “You should wear a hat,” his uncle said. “If you don’t wear a hat, forty percent of your body heat escapes from your head, and you feel cold all over.” Carella did not like hats. He told his uncle he did not like hats. His uncle tapped his temple with his forefinger. “Pazzo,” he said, which meant “crazy” in Italian. It was Carella’s uncle who’d told him the only haberdashery joke he’d ever heard in his life. “A man walks into a haberdashery,” his uncle said. “The haberdasherer comes over to him and says, ‘Yes, sir, do you have anything in mind?’ The man says, ‘I have pussy in mind, but let me see a hat.’ ” Carella was sixteen years old when his uncle told him that story. They were in his uncle’s haberdashery, which he was still running from a wheelchair. He died three years later.