“I guess not,” Kling said.
“You’ve never been married, have you?” she said.
“I’ve been married,” he said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And?”
Kling hesitated.
“I was recently divorced,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Well,” he said, and lifted his wineglass, avoiding her steady gaze. “How about you?” he said. He was looking out over the river now.
“Still hoping for Mr. Right,” she said. “I keep having this fantasy... well, I really shouldn’t tell you this.”
“No, go ahead,” he said, turning back to her.
“Well... really, it’s silly,” she said, and he could swear that she was blushing, but perhaps it was only the red glow of the candle in its holder. “I keep fantasizing that one of those rapists out there will succeed one night, do you know? I won’t be able to get my gun on him in time, he’ll do whatever he wants and — surprise — he’ll turn out to be Prince Charming! I’ll fall madly in love with him, and we’ll live happily ever after. Whatever you do, don’t tell that to Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. I’ll get drummed out of the women’s movement.”
“The old rape fantasy,” Kling said.
“Except that I happen to deal with real rape,” Eileen said. “And I know it isn’t fun and games.”
“Mm,” Kling said.
“So why should I fantasize about it? I mean, I’ve come within a hairsbreadth so many times—”
“Maybe that’s what accounts for the fantasy,” Kling said. “The fantasy makes it seem less frightening. Your work. What you have to do. Maybe,” he said, and shrugged.
“We’ve just had our ‘I-Don’t-Know-Why-I’m-Telling-You-All-This’ scene, haven’t we?”
“I suppose so,” he said, and smiled.
“Somebody ought to write a book about all the different kinds of clichéd scenes,” she said. “The one I like best, I think, is when the killer has a gun on the guy who’s been chasing him, and he says something like, ‘It’s safe to tell you this now because in three seconds flat you’ll be dead,’ and then proceeds to brag about all the people he killed and how and why he killed them.”
“I wish it was that easy,” Kling said, still smiling.
“Or what I call the ‘Uh-Oh!’ scene. Where we see a wife in bed with her lover, and then we cut away to the husband putting his key in the door latch, and we’re all supposed to go, ‘Uh-oh, here it comes!’ Don’t you just love that scene?”
The smile dropped from his face.
She looked into his eyes, trying to read them, knowing she’d somehow made a dreadful mistake, and trying to understand what she’d said that had been so terribly wrong. Until that moment, they’d seemed—
“I’d better get the check,” he said.
She knew better than to press it. If there was one thing she’d learned as a decoy, it was patience.
“Sure,” she said, “I’ve got to run, too. Hey, thanks for bringing the earring back, really. I appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Kling said, but he wasn’t looking at her, he was signaling to the waiter instead.
They sat in silence while they waited for the check. When they left the place, they shook hands politely on the sidewalk outside and walked off in opposite directions.
“I hate scenes that are played offstage,” Meyer said.
“So why didn’t you come in there with me?” Carella said.
“It was bad enough listening to him yell from outside,” Meyer said. “You want to tell me what it was all about?”
They were sitting side by side in the front seat of one of the precinct’s newest sedans. Each time they checked out the car, Sergeant Murchison came out back to list any scratches or dents on it. That way he would know who was responsible for any new scratches or dents. The car was cozy and warm. The rear tires were snow tires with studs. Hawes and Willis, who had last used the car, said that it actually ran on ice. Carella and Meyer — heading downtown for Timothy Moore’s apartment — were having no difficulties on the city’s frozen tundra.
“So let me hear it,” Meyer said.
“Very simple,” Carella said. “Paco Lopez’s girlfriend was stabbed Sunday night.”
“What!”
“Died yesterday morning at Saint Jude’s.”
“Where’d this happen?” Meyer asked.
“That’s just it. Charlie Car found her outside her building on Ainsley Avenue. It’s all on the Activity Report spindle, Meyer. A Ten-Twenty-four described as a cutting, victim taken to Saint Jude’s.”
“Who was catching Sunday night?”
“That’s not the point. The blues didn’t find her till Monday morning. The graveyard shift had already been relieved, this was the eight-to-four.”
“That’s when we were catching!” Meyer said.
“You’re beginning to get the message.”
“So why the hell didn’t the blues call it in?”
“They did.”
“Then why didn’t we get it?”
“Officer’s discretion,” Carella said. “Charlie Car called for a meat wagon, and then accompanied it to the hospital. The girl was still alive when they delivered her. That’s the way it appears on the activity report they wrote up at the end of their tour.”
“At four o’clock, you mean? What time did the girl die?”
“Around eleven.”
“Is that on an activity report, too?”
“How could it be? I found out from Danny Gimp.”
“Great! A snitch pulling together the pieces!”
“Exactly Pete’s words.”
“So what now?”
“Now we ask Timothy Moore about the ‘extra’ cash his girlfriend was making.”
“I mean, what about the Quadrado girl?”
“She was cut, Meyer. Does that sound like the same m.o. to you?”
“Maybe the guy’s running out of bullets.”
“Maybe. Or maybe this was just another one of the hundred cuttings we get every day of the week. I want to talk to her cousin later, the kid who first put us onto her when we caught the Lopez murder. Maybe he’ll know something.”
“If this is related to cocaine—”
“It might be.”
“Then it’s starting to look like gang shit,” Meyer said. “And gang shit, I can do without.”
“Let’s talk to Moore,” Carella said.
Well, they knew it was a big city. And in a big city, mistakes were bound to occur. Chances were that even if they’d known of Judite Quadrado’s condition before she’d died, the girl might not have been able to tell them anything of value in cracking their case — or cases as the case happened to be. Knowing about her in time to have questioned her, and perhaps to have elicited a deathbed statement, might have proved a pointless exercise, anyway. Even in a big city, though, it was nice to know things.
Carella was very happy, for example, to have learned from Lieutenant Byrnes (between his readings of the Riot Act) that Brown and Kling had found $300,000 in $100 bills in the safe of Marvin Edelman, the last — or at least the most recent; they hoped he’d prove to be the last — of the murder victims killed with the same .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. The presence of such a large bundle might have been attributed, of course, to the very nature of the man’s business: a precious-gems merchant did not normally accept subway tokens in exchange for his commodity. But why such an awesome amount of money had been kept in his office safe, instead of in a bank account, or even a bank’s safety deposit box, was something that troubled the detectives. It might not have troubled them so much if Edelman’s fellow victims hadn’t been involved, in one way or another, with cocaine. When cocaine was on the scene, big bucks were mandatory. And the bucks in Edelman’s safe were very big indeed.