“You’re growing another head the size of your first one,” Carella said.
“I hate hospitals,” Brown said.
“How do you like comas?” Carella asked.
“I’m not in coma. Do I look like I’m in coma?”
“Let me got some ice for that lump. Jesus, that’s some lump.”
“The man hit me with a truck,” Brown said.
Carella was jiggling the receiver-rest again. When the desk clerk came on, he said, “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“What?” the desk clerk said.
“Get some ice up here on the double. Room 502.”
“Room service is closed,” the desk clerk said.
“Open it. This is the police.”
“Right away,” the desk clerk said, and hung up.
“Some people sure pick ratty dumps to stay in,” Carella said.
“Some people try to lend credence to their cover,” Brown said, and attempted a smile. It didn’t work. He winced in pain, and closed his eyes again.
“Did you see who did it?” Carella asked.
“I saw him, but he had a stocking over his face.”
Carella shook his head. “Ever since the first movie where a guy had a stocking over his face, we get nothing but guys with stockings over their faces.” He looked around the room. “Did a nice job on the room, too.”
“Beautiful,” Brown said.
“We’re lucky he left you alive.”
“Why wouldn’t he? He wasn’t after me, he was after the picture.”
“Who do you think it was, Artie?”
“My partner,” Brown said. “Albert Weinberg.”
A knock sounded on the door. Carella went to answer it. The desk clerk was standing there in his shirtsleeves, a soup dish full of ice cubes in his hands. “I had to go to the restaurant up the block for these,” he complained.
“Great, thanks a lot,” Carella said.
The desk clerk kept standing there. Carella reached into his pocket and handed him a quarter.
“Thanks,” the desk clerk said sourly.
Carella closed the door, went into the bathroom, wrapped a towel around the ice cubes, and then went back to Brown. “Here,” he said, “put this on that lump.”
Brown nodded, accepted the ice pack, pressed it to his swollen eye, and winced again.
“How do you know it was Weinberg?”
“I don’t, for sure.”
“Was he a big guy?”
“They all look big when they’re about to hit you,” Brown said.
“What I mean is did you get a good look at him?”
“No, it all happened...”
“...in a split second,” Carella said, and both men smiled. Brown winced again. “So what makes you think it was Weinberg?”
“I had him on the phone tonight,” Brown said. “Told him we’d scored.”
“Who else did you talk to?”
“Irving Krutch.”
“So it could have been Krutch.”
“Sure. It also could have been my wife Caroline. I talked to her, too.”
“She pretty good with a blunt instrument?”
“As good as most,” Brown said.
“How’s that eye feel?”
“Terrible.”
“I think I’d better get a meat wagon.”
“No, you don’t,” Brown said. “We’ve got work to do.”
“You’re not the only cop in this city,” Carella said.
“I’m the only one who got clobbered in this room tonight,” Brown said.
Carella sighed. “One consolation, anyway,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“He didn’t get what he came after. That’s in my desk drawer, back at the ranch.”
It was decided over Brown’s protests (actually, Brown only did the protesting; Carella did all the deciding) that he would be taken to Saint Catherine’s Hospital, a dozen blocks away, for examination and treatment in the Emergency Room. Carella left him there at 2:00 A.M., still grumbling, and caught a taxi over to Weinberg’s apartment on North Colman. At that hour of the morning, the neighborhood resembled a lunar landscape. Weinberg’s rooming house was the only building on the street that had not already been abandoned by its owners, those entrepreneurs having decided the buildings were too expensive to maintain in accordance with the city’s laws; those respectable businessmen also having discovered that no one was willing to buy such white elephants; those wheeler-dealers having merely pulled out, leaving a row of run-down tenements as a gift to the city, lucky city.
There was a time, and this not too long ago, when hippies and runaways had moved into these buildings en masse, painting their colorful flower designs on the brick fronts, sleeping on mattresses spread wall-to-wall, puffing pot, dropping acid, living the happy carefree life of the commune-dweller. The regular residents of this run-down slum area, forced to live here because of certain language and racial barriers the city raised against some of its citizens, could not understand why anyone would come to live here of his own free will and choice — but they certainly knew pigeons when they saw them. The hippies, the runaways, the carefree happy commune-dwellers had no need for telephones, being in touch as they were with nature. The only time they might have needed Mr. Bell’s invention was when the restless natives of the ghetto came piling into the apartment to beat up the boys and rape the girls and take whatever meager possessions were worth hocking. The hippies and the runaways decided that perhaps this wasteland was not for them, it becoming more and more difficult to repeat the word “Love” when a fist was being crashed into the mouth or a girl was screaming on the mattress in the other room. The ghetto regulars had struck back at a society that forced them to live in such surroundings, little realizing that the people they were harassing had themselves broken with the same society, a society that allowed such ghettos to exist. It was a case of poor slob beating up on poor slob, while five blocks away, a fashionable discotheque called Rembrandt’s bleated its rock-and-roll music, and ladies in sequined slacks and men in dancing slippers laughed away the night. The hippies were gone now, the flower designs on the building fronts faded by the sun or washed away by the rain. The slum dwellers had reclaimed their disputed turf, and now their only enemies were the rats that roamed in the deserted tenement shells. Weinberg lived in a rooming house on a street that looked as if it had suffered a nuclear attack. It stood with shabby pride in the middle of the block, a single light burning on the second floor of the building. Aside from that, its somber face was dark. Carella climbed to the top floor, trying to ignore the rustle of rats on the staircase, the hackles rising at the back of his neck. When he reached the fourth floor, he struck a match, found 4C at the far end of the hall, and put his ear to the door, listening. To any casual passerby unfamiliar with the working ways of the police — and there were likely to be, oh, just scores of such passersby on a pitch-black landing at 2:00 in the morning — Carella might have looked like an eavesdropper, which is just what he was. He had been with the police department for a good many years, though, and he could not recall ever knocking on a door behind which there might be a criminal without first listening. He listened now for about five minutes, heard nothing, and only then knocked.
There was no answer.
He had decided together with Brown that his visit to Weinberg should not come as a visit from a cop. Instead, he was to pose as one of the “friends” Brown had hinted at, here to seek retribution for the beating Weinberg had possibly administered. The only problem seemed to be that no one was answering the door. Carella knocked again. Weinberg had earlier told Brown that he was about to curl up with a bottle of bourbon. Was it possible he had gone over to the Selby Arms, kicked Brown and the room around a little, and then returned here to his own little palace to knock off the bottle of cheer? Carella banged on the door a third time.