The squadroom was relatively quiet with Genero and all of his prisoners (the delivered hooker had escaped his grasp — for the time being, anyway) gone their separate ways. Cotton Hawes, at his desk, was taking a complaint from a fat black man who insisted that his wife threw hot grits all over him every time he got home late because she thought he was out larking around with another woman. Those were his words: larking around. Hawes found them somewhat poetic. Hal Willis had already gone down to book the two juves and was leading them into the alley running through the station house and adjacent to the detention cells on the street level, where Genero’s drunks were already in the van that would take them downtown. The juves still refused to take off the ski masks. One of the drunks in the van asked them if they were going to a party. As Willis delivered them to the uniformed cop, who slammed the locked door of the van behind them, Eileen Burke perched herself on the edge of Willis’s desk upstairs, and crossed her splendid legs, and then looked at her watch, and then lit a cigarette.
“Hello, Eileen,” Hawes said to her as he led the fat black gritsvictim past her and out of the squadroom, presumably to confront the grits-tossing wife in the sanctity of their own peaceful home. Eileen watched Hawes as he disappeared down the corridor. He had red hair, much like her own. She wondered idly if the progeny of two redheaded people would also be redheads. She wondered idly if Hawes was married. She began jiggling one foot.
Some three feet away from where she smoked her cigarette and impatiently jiggled her foot, Meyer was on the telephone with his wife, telling her he’d delivered a baby right here in the squadroom with a little — but only a little — help from Alf Miscolo, who was at the moment down the hall in the Clerical Office, brewing another pot of coffee now that his hot water was no longer urgently needed in maternity cases. On another telephone, at his own desk, Carella finally made contact with Levine at Midtown East, and began apologizing to him for having taken so long to get back.
It had taken him all this while to get back because a police department is like a small army, and a homicide is like a big battle in a continuing war. In big armies, even small battles get serious consideration. In a small army like a police department, a big battle like homicide commands a great deal of attention and participation from a great many people all up and down the line. In the city for which these men worked, the precinct detective assigned to any homicide was the one who’d caught the original squeal, generally assisted by any member of the detective team who’d been catching with him at the time. The moment a squadroom detective said, “I’ve got it,” or, “I’m rolling,” or some such other colorful jargon to that effect, the case was officially his, and he was expected to stick with it until he solved it, or cleared it (which was not the same thing as solving it), or simply threw up his hands in despair on it. But since homicide was such a big deal — a major offensive, so to speak — there were other people in the department who were terribly interested in the activity down there at the squadroom level. In this city, once a squadroom detective caught a bona fide or “good” homicide, he had to inform:
The Police Commissioner
The Chief of Detectives
The District Commander of the Detective Division
Homicide East or Homicide West, depending upon where the body was found
The Squad and Precinct Commanding Officers of the precinct in which the body was found
The Medical Examiner
The District Attorney
The Telegraph, Telephone, and Teletype Bureau at Headquarters
The Police Laboratory
The Police Photo Unit
Not all of these people had to be consulted on protocol that Saturday morning. But the situation was knotty enough to cause Lieutenant Byrnes, in command of the 87th Squad, to wrinkle his brow and phone Captain Frick, in command of the entire 87th Precinct, who in turn hemmed and hawed a bit and then cleverly said, “Well, Pete, this would seem to be a matter of ‘member of the force,’ wouldn’t it?” which Byrnes took to mean “member of the force handling the case,” which is exactly what he’d called Frick about in the first place. Frick advised Byrnes to go to superior rank within the division on this, which necessitated a call to the Chief of Detectives, something Byrnes would have preferred avoiding lest his superior officer think he was not up on current regs. The Chief of Detectives did a little telephonic head scratching and told Byrnes he had not had one like this in a great many years and since the police department changed its rules and regulations as often as it changed its metaphoric underwear, he would have to check on what current procedure might be, after which he would get back to Byrnes. Byrnes, eager to remind his superior officer that the men of the Eight-Seven were conscientious law enforcers, casually mentioned that there were two homicides involved here, and two detectives in separate parts of the city waiting to get moving on the second and freshest of the killings (which wasn’t quite true; neither Levine nor Carella was particularly hot to trot) so he would appreciate it if the Chief could get back to him as soon as possible on this. The Chief did not get back until close to 11:00 A.M., after he’d had a conversation with the Chief of Operations, whose office was two stories above the Chief’s own in the Headquarters Building. The Chief told Byrnes that in the opinion of the Chief of Operations, the former homicide took priority over the latter; the member of the force handling the case should be the squadroom detective who’d caught the initial squeal, whenever that had been. Byrnes didn’t know when it had been, either; he simply said, “Yes, whenever. Thank you, Chief,” and hung up, and summoned Carella to his office and said, “It’s ours,” meaning not that it was actually theirs (although in a greater sense it was) but that it was his — Carella’s. When Carella reported all this to Levine, Levine said, “Good luck,” managing to convey an enormous sense of relief in those two simple words.
Hal Willis came back into the squadroom some five minutes later, just as a windblown and frostbitten patrolman from Midtown East was delivering the packet promised by Levine when he’d first spoken to Carella earlier this morning. Willis spotted Eileen sitting on the edge of his desk, smiled, and virtually tap-danced over to her. Grinning, he said, “Hey, they sent you, huh?”
“Here’s that stuff from Levine,” Carella said to Meyer.
“You were hoping for Raquel Welch maybe?” Eileen said.
“Who’s complaining?” Willis said.
“Who raped who this time?” Eileen asked.