“What have you got for me?” he asked warily.
“Another one,” Dorfsman said.
“Another what?”
“Another corpse.”
Carella waited. Dorfsman sounded as if he was enjoying himself immensely. Carella did not want to spoil his fun. A corpse on the day of the observance of Washington’s Birthday, even if it was a week before Washington’s Birthday, was certainly amusing.
“I haven’t even called Kling yet,” Dorfsman said. “You’re the first one I’m calling.”
“Kling?” Carella said.
“Kling,” Dorfsman said. “Don’t you guys ever talk to each other up there? Kling caught the squeal Saturday night. Sunday morning, actually. Two o’clock Sunday morning.”
“What are you talking about?” Carella asked.
“A homicide on Silvermine Oval. Guy named Marvin Edelman, two slugs pumped into his head.” Dorfsman still sounded as if he was smiling. “I’m calling you first, Steve,” he said.
“So I gather. How come?”
“Same gun as the other two,” Dorfsman said cheerfully.
It was beginning to look like they had a crazy on their hands.
9
Crazies make police work difficult.
When you’ve got a crazy on your hands, you might just as well throw away the manual and work the case by the seat of your pants, because that’s the way the crazy is working his case. There were a lot of crazies in this city, but thankfully most of them were content to walk up and down Hall Avenue carrying signs about doomsday or else muttering to themselves about the Mayor and the weather. The crazies in this city seemed to think the Mayor was responsible for the weather. Maybe he was.
Detective Lieutenant Peter Byrnes seemed to think his squad was responsible for the lack of communication on what now appeared to be three linked murders. Byrnes, when apprised of what Dorfsman had said on the telephone, agreed emphatically with him: Didn’t the guys up here ever talk to each other?
“You get a murder last Tuesday night and another one on Saturday night, Sunday morning, whenever it was,” Byrnes said. “The first one is on Culver Avenue, and the next one is on Silvermine Road, just a few blocks away! Both of them are gunshot murders, but does it ever occur to you masterminds to do an in-house cross-check? I’m not even mentioning the little girl who got killed downtown on Friday night, I wouldn’t dream of mentioning a third gunshot murder to sleuths of such remarkable perception,” Byrnes said, gathering steam, “but does anyone up here even glance at the activity reports, which is why we keep activity reports in the first place, so that every cop in this precinct, uniformed or plainclothes, will know what the hell is going on up here!”
In the squadroom outside, Miscolo and a handful of uniformed patrolmen were milling about apprehensively, listening to Byrnes’s angry voice from behind the frosted glass door to his office, and knowing that someone in there was getting chewed out mightily. Actually, there were four someones in there, but none of the squadroom eavesdroppers knew that because the detectives had been called at home early that Tuesday morning and asked to report at the crack of dawn (well, 7:30 A.M.) and the uniformed force hadn’t begun trickling in until 7:45 A.M., when roll call took place every morning in the muster room downstairs. The four plainclothes someones were, in alphabetical order, Detectives Brown, Carella, Kling, and Meyer. They were all looking at their shoes.
Byrnes’s rage comprised one part pressure from “rank” downtown and one part sheer indignation over the stupidity of men he had hoped, after all these years, could do their jobs with at least a modicum of routine efficiency. Secretly, he suspected Kling was more at fault than any of the others because of the clamlike posture he had developed after his divorce. But he did not want to single out Kling as the sole perpetrator here because that would only serve to embarrass him and perhaps cause disharmony among four detectives who now seemed fated to work together on solving three separate murders. So Byrnes ranted and raved about simple procedures, which — if only followed to the letter — would dispel confusion, eliminate duplication, and (“A consummation devoutly to be wished,” he actually said) maybe solve a case every now and then around here.
“All right,” he said at last, “that’s that.”
“Pete...,” Carella started.
“I said all right, that’s the end of it,” Byrnes said. “Have a piece of candy,” he said, shoving the half-depleted box across the desk toward his surprised detectives. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
“Not much,” Carella said.
“Is this a crazy we’re dealing with here?”
“Maybe,” Brown said.
“Have you got a line on that .38 yet?”
“No, Pete, we’ve been—”
“Round up your street gun dealers, find out who was shopping for a gun that fits the description.”
“Yes, Pete,” Carella said.
“How does Lopez tie in with these other two?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Were either of them doing drugs?”
“The girl was. We don’t know about Edelman yet.”
“Was Lopez supplying her?”
“We don’t know yet. We do know she was bringing coke in for some of the other people in the show.”
“This last one was a diamond merchant, huh?”
“Precious gems,” Kling said.
“Did he know either Lopez or the girl?”
“We don’t know yet,” Kling said. “But he was held up sometime last summer, and that may be something to go on. We’ll be running it through the computer this morning.”
“Don’t go squeezing them,” Byrnes said to Meyer, who was reaching for a chocolate in the box. “Take all you want, but eat the ones you touch, and don’t go squishing up the whole box.”
Meyer, who had in fact been about to squeeze one of the chocolates, gave Byrnes an offended look.
“What’s with her boyfriend?” Byrnes said. “The girl’s boyfriend.”
“He was on the phone most of last Friday night,” Carella said. “The night the girl was killed.”
“On the phone? Who with?”
“Another student. The boyfriend’s a med student at Ramsey.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Timothy Moore.”
“And his friend’s name?”
“Karl Loeb.”
“You checked with him?”
“Loeb? Yes. They were gabbing till almost two in the morning.”
“Who called who?” Byrnes asked.
“Back and forth.”
“What else?”
“The producer of the show, man named Allan Carter, is playing house with one of the dancers.”
“So what?” Byrnes asked.
“He’s married,” Meyer said.
“So what?” Byrnes asked again.
“We think he’s lying to us,” Meyer said.
“About his little tootsie?” Byrnes said, using one of the quaint, archaic terms that sometimes crept into his vocabulary, for which the younger men on the squad almost always forgave him.
“No, he was straight on about that,” Carella said. “But he claims to have known the dead girl only casually, and it doesn’t smell right.”
“Why would he lie about that?” Byrnes asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Carella said.