He watched the moving pencil.
“Very good,” he said, “come, we go in back. Charlie Chen so happy you come see him. My sons all married now, I tell you? My oldest son a doctor Los Angeles. A head doctor!” he said, and burst out laughing. “A shrink! You believe it? My oldest son! My other two sons... come in back, lady... my other two sons...”
From where Captain Sam Grossman stood at the windows looking down at High Street, he could see out over almost all of the downtown section of the city. The new Headquarters Building was a structure made almost entirely of glass (or so it appeared from the outside) and Grossman sometimes wondered if anyone down there in the street was watching him as he went about his daily commonplace chores — like trying to get through to the Eight-Seven on the telephone, which was both commonplace and irritating. Actually, Grossman rarely thought of his work in the lab as being anything but important and exciting and very far from commonplace, but he would not have admitted that to anyone in the world, with the possible exception of his wife. The number was still busy. He momentarily pressed one of the receiver rest buttons, got a fresh dial tone, and dialed the number again. He got another busy signal. Sighing, Grossman cradled the receiver and looked at his watch. I shouldn’t even be here today, he thought. This is Sunday.
He was here today because someone thought it might be amusing to restage the Valentine’s Day Massacre right here in this city instead of in Chicago, where it had originally taken place in 1929. What had happened back then, if Grossman’s memory of history served, was that some nice fellows from Al Capone’s gang forced seven unarmed but equally nice fellows from the Bugs Moran gang to line up against a garage wall and then shot them down with machine guns. Oh boy, that was some massacre. It was also a pretty good joke since the guys from the Capone gang were all dressed as policemen. There were some wags in Chicago at the time who maintained that the hoods were only behaving like policemen, too, but that was mere conjecture. Nonetheless, at 9:00 this morning — which by Grossman’s watch was almost three hours ago — several uniformed “policemen” had broken into a garage housing not bootleggers but instead narcotics traffickers, and had asked them to line up against the wall, and had shot them down in cold blood. One of the surprise-shooters had spray-painted the outline of a big red heart on the wall. The killers hadn’t even bothered to take with them the estimated four kilos of heroin the traffickers had been processing when they’d broken in; perhaps they felt the red heart on the wall, and the red blood all over the floor, complemented the pristine white of the uncut heroin on the table. Either way, there were seven dead men on the Lower Platform, as the area closest to the city’s Old Quarter was called, and those men had bullets in them, and those bullets had been recovered from their respective cadavers and sent to the laboratory together with the empty spray can and a slew of fingerprints lifted from hither and yon, not to mention some paint scrapings taken from the lamppost opposite the garage, presumably left there when the getaway car backed into it, leaving as well a deposit of taillight glass splinters on the pavement, all in all a nice batch of material for the lab to ponder on a nice Sunday morning.
Grossman dialed the number again.
Would miracles never? It was actually ringing!
“87th Squad, Genero,” a harried-sounding voice said.
“Detective Carella, please,” Grossman said.
“Can he call you back?” Genero said. “We’re very busy up here just now.”
“I’ve been trying to get through for the past ten minutes,” Grossman said.
“Yeah, that’s ’cause the lines’ve been busy,” Genero said. “All hell is busting loose up here. Give me your name and I’ll ask him to call back.”
“No, give him my name and tell him I’m on the line waiting,” Grossman said, annoyed.
“Well, what is your name, mister?” Genero said, somewhat snottily.
“Captain Grossman,” Grossman said. “What’s your name?”
“He’ll be right with you, sir,” Genero said, forgetting to tell Grossman his name. Grossman heard the receiver clattering onto a hard surface. There was a great deal of yelling and hollering in the background, but that was usual for the Eight-Seven, even on a Sunday.
“Detective Carella,” Carella said. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Steve, this is Sam Grossman.”
“Sam? He told me it was a Captain Holtzer.”
“No, it’s a Captain Grossman. What’s going on up there? It sounds like World War Three.”
“We have a delegation of angry citizens,” Carella said.
“Angry about what?”
“A person shitting in the hallways.”
“Don’t send me samples,” Grossman said at once.
“You may think it’s comical,” Carella said, lowering his voice, “and frankly, so do I. But the tenants of 5411 Ainsley do not find it amusing at all. They are here en masse, demanding police action.”
“What do they want you to do, Steve?”
“Apprehend the Mad Shitter,” Carella said, and Grossman burst out laughing. Carella started laughing, too. In the background, over Carella’s laughter, Grossman could hear someone yelling in Spanish. He thought he detected the word mierda.
“Steve,” he said, “I hate to take you away from matters of great moment—”
“Matters of great movement, you mean,” Carella said, and both men burst out laughing again; there was nothing a grown cop liked better than a scatological joke unless it was a joke about a cop on the take. Both cops laughed for what must have been a full two minutes while behind them everyone was shouting like the Bay of Pigs. At last, the laughter subsided. So did all the Spanish voices in the background.
“Where’d they all go, all of a sudden?” Grossman asked.
“Home!” Carella said, and burst out laughing again. “Genero told them he’d arrange a lineup for them! Can you picture eight cops and a possible perp throwing moons at twenty-six concerned Hispanic tenants?”
Grossman began laughing so hard he thought he would wet his pants. Another two minutes went by before either of the men could speak. It was not always like this when Carella and Grossman got on the phone together, but both men were grateful for those times when it was. Usually, Grossman presented a much soberer demeanor to the detectives with whom he worked. Tall and blue eyed, rather somber looking in his unrimmed spectacles, he resembled a New England farmer more than he did a scientist, and his clipped manner of speaking did little to belie the notion. Standing face to face with Sam Grossman in the sterile orderliness of his laboratory, you had the feeling that if you asked him directions to the next town, he’d say you couldn’t get there from here. But every so often, perhaps because he liked Carella so much, Grossman seemed to forget momentarily that his job was often inextricably linked with violent death.
“About this girl’s handbag,” he said, and Carella knew he was getting down to business.
“The Anderson girl?” he said.
“Sally Anderson, right,” Grossman said. “I’ll send you the full report later, right down to what brand of cigarettes she smoked. But for now... this was flagged for possible cocaine, wasn’t it?”
“Because the other victim was a—”
“That’s what the card says, anyway.”
“Did you find anything that might be cocaine?”