A round-up of known gram dealers had brought up the information that Lopez was truly a small-time operator, something slightly higher than a mule in the hierarchy of cocaine “redistribution” — as one of the dealers euphemistically called it. Lopez had enjoyed a small following of users whom he’d supplied on a modest basis, but if he pulled down ten, twelve bills a week, that was a lot. Listening to this, Meyer and Carella, who each and separately pulled down only twenty bills a month, wondered if perhaps they were not in the wrong profession. All of these more successful dealers agreed that Lopez hadn’t even been worth killing. He was a threat to nobody, operating as he was on the fringes of gram-dealer society. They all figured some angry cokie had iced him. Maybe Lopez got fancy, started cutting his stuff too fine in an attempt to get more mileage out of the dust, and maybe an irate user had put the blocks to him. As simple as that. But how did a cocaine murder tie in with Sally Anderson?
“You know what I wish?” Carella said.
“What?”
“I wish we hadn’t inherited this one.”
But they had.
The superintendent of Sally Anderson’s building on North Campbell Street was not happy to see them. He had been awakened at close to 1:00 in the morning and interrogated by two other detectives, and he had not been able to fall asleep again till almost 2:30, and then he’d had to get up at 6:00 to put out the garbage cans before the Sanitation Department trucks arrived, and then he’d had to shovel the sidewalk in front of the building clear of snow, and now it was ten minutes to 12:00, and he was hungry, and he wanted his lunch, and he didn’t want to be talking to two more detectives when he hadn’t even seen what happened and hardly knew the girl from a hole in the wall.
“All I know is she lives in the building,” he said. “Her name’s Sally Anderson, she lives in apartment 3-A.” He kept using the present tense when referring to her, as though her death had never happened, and even if it had was of small consequence to him — which was the truth.
“Did she live here alone?” Carella asked.
“Far as I know.”
“What does that mean?”
“These girls today, who knows who they live with? A guy, two guys, another girl, a cat, a dog, a goldfish — who knows, and who cares?”
“But as far as you know,” Meyer said patiently, “she was living here alone.”
“As far as I know,” the super said. He was a gaunt and graying man who had lived in this city all his life. There were burglaries day and night in this building and in all the other buildings he’d ever worked in over the years. He was no stranger to violence, and had little patience with the minor details of it.
“Mind if we take a look at the apartment?” Carella asked.
“Makes no matter to me,” the super said, and led them upstairs, and unlocked the door for them.
The apartment was small and furnished eclectically, modern pieces and antiques rubbing elbows side by side, throw pillows on the black leather sofa and the carpeted floor surrounding it, framed three-sheets from various shows, including the current hit Fatback, hanging on all the walls. There were several framed professional photographs of the girl in ballet tights, in various ballet positions, hanging on the wall outside the bathroom. There was a poster for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. There was a bottle of white wine on the kitchen counter. They found her appointment calendar near the telephone in her bedroom, on a night table alongside a king-sized bed covered with a patchwork quilt.
“Did you call the lab?” Meyer asked.
“They’re through here,” Carella said, nodding, and picked up the appointment calendar. It was one of those large, spiral-bound books that, when opened, showed each separate day at a glance. A large, orange-colored, plastic paper clip allowed the calendar to fall open easily to the twelfth of February. Meyer took out his notebook and began listing her daily appointments since the beginning of the month. He had come through Thursday, February 4, when the doorbell rang. Both detectives looked at each other. Carella went to the door, half expecting the super would be standing out there in the hall, asking for a search warrant or something.
The girl outside the door looked at Carella and said, “Oh.”
She looked at the numeral on the door as if somehow she’d made a mistake, and then she frowned. She was a tall, lissome Oriental girl, perhaps five nine or five ten, with midnight black hair and slanted eyes the color of loam. She was wearing a black ski parka over blue jeans tucked into knee-high black boots. A yellow watch cap was tilted saucily over one brow. A long yellow-and-black muffler hung loose over the front of the parka.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Carella said.
“Where’s Sally?” she asked, and peered past him into the apartment. Meyer had come out of the bedroom and stood in the living room now, within her frame of vision. Both men were still wearing overcoats. She glanced briefly at Meyer, and then looked back at Carella again.
“What is this?” she said. “What’s going on here?”
She backed away a pace, and then quickly glanced over her shoulder toward the elevator. Carella knew just what she was thinking. Two strangers in overcoats, no sign of her girlfriend Sally — she was interrupting a burglary in progress. Before she could panic, he said, “We’re policemen.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said skeptically, and glanced again toward the elevator.
A native, Carella thought, and almost smiled.
He took a small leather case from his pocket, and opened it to show his shield and his ID card. “Detective Carella,” he said, “87th Squad. This is my partner, Detective Meyer.”
The girl bent to look at the shield. She bent from the waist, her legs and her back stiff. A dancer, he thought. She straightened up again and looked him dead in the eye.
“What’s the matter?’ she said. “Where’s Sally?’
“Can you tell us who you are, please?” Carella asked.
“Tina Wong. Where’s Sally?”
Carella hesitated.
“What are you doing here, Miss Wong?” he said.
“Where’s Sally?” she said again, and moved past him into the apartment. She was obviously familiar with the place; she went first into the kitchen and then the bedroom and then came back into the living room, where the two detectives were waiting. “Where is she?” she said.
“Was she expecting you, Miss Wong?” Carella asked.
The girl did not answer him. Her eyes were beginning to reflect the knowledge that something was wrong. They darted nervously in her narrow face, moving from one detective to the other. Carella did not want to tell her, not yet, that Sally Anderson was dead. The story had not made the morning’s papers, but it was certain to be in the afternoon editions, on the newsstands by now. If she already knew Sally was dead, Carella wanted the information to come from her.
“Was she expecting you?” he said again.
The girl looked at her watch. “I’m five minutes early,” she said. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on here? Was she robbed or something?”
A native for sure, he thought. In this city, burglary was always confused with robbery — except by the police. The police only had trouble distinguishing one degree of burglary from another.
“What were your plans?” Carella asked.
“Plans?”