“That’s a felony,” Brown said, lying.
“Section 812 of the Penal Law,” Carella said.
“Look, I...”
“Come along, Mr. Coombs,” Brown said, and held out the handcuffs.
“What if I... what if I hadn’t thrown out the thing, the picture?” Coombs asked.
“Did you?”
“I didn’t. I got it. I’ll give it to you. Jesus, I’ll give it to you.”
“Get it,” Brown said.
A ferryboat is a good place for speculation. It is also a good place for listening. So on the way back to Isola, Carella and Brown each did a little speculating and a little listening.
“Four guys in the holdup,” Brown said. “Carmine Bonamico, who masterminded the job...”
“Some mastermind,” Carella said.
“Jerry Stein, who drove the getaway heap, and two guns named Lou D’Amore and Pete Ryan. Four altogether.”
“So?”
“So figure it out. Pete Ryan gave one piece of the snapshot to his aunt Dorothea McNally and another piece to his good old pal Robert Coombs...”
“Of Bob’s Famous Roadside Emporium,” Carella said.
“Correct,” Brown said, “Which means, using a method known as arithmetical deduction, that Ryan was at one time in possession of two pieces of the snapshot.”
“Correct,” Carella said.
“Is it not reasonable to assume, therefore, that each member of the gang was likewise in possession of two pieces of the snapshot?”
“It is reasonable, but not necessarily exclusive,” Carella said.
“How do you mean, Holmes?”
“Elementary. You are assuming there are only eight pieces of the full photograph. However, using other multiples of four, we can equally reason that there are twelve pieces, or sixteen pieces, or indeed...”
“My guess is eight,” Brown said.
“Why the magic number eight?”
“If you were planning a heist, would you go cutting a picture into twelve parts? Or sixteen?”
“Or twenty?” Carella said.
“Would you?”
“I think it’s a goofy idea to begin with,” Carella said. “I wouldn’t cut up a photograph at all.”
“My guess is eight. Four guys, two pieces each. We’ve now got six of them. My guess is we’ll find number seven in Gerry Ferguson’s safe. That’ll leave only one piece to go. One, baby. One more piece and we’re home free.”
As Robert Burns, that sage Scottish poet once remarked, however, the best laid plans...
That afternoon, they went down to the Ferguson Gallery with a warrant obliging Geraldine Ferguson to open her safe. And though they searched it from top to bottom and found a lot of goodies in it, none of which were related to any crime, they did not find another piece of the photograph. By the end of that Monday, they still had only six pieces.
Six.
Count ‘em.
Six.
As they studied these assembled pieces in the midnight silence of the squadroom, something struck them as being terribly wrong. There was no sky in the picture. And because there was no sky, neither was there an up nor a down, a top nor a bottom. They were looking at a landscape without perspective, and it made no sense.
10
The nylon stocking was wrapped tightly around her throat, embedded in the soft flesh of her neck. Her eyes were bulging, and she lay grotesque in death upon the turquoise-colored rug in her bedroom, wearing a baby-doll nightgown and bikini panties, the bedsheets trailing off the bed and tangled in one twisted leg.
Geraldine Ferguson would never again swear in Italian, never again proposition married spades, never again charge exorbitant prices for a painting or a piece of sculpture. Geraldine Ferguson lay robbed of life in a posture as angularly absurd as the geometric designs that had shrieked from the walls of her gallery, death silent and shrill in that turquoise-matted sanctuary, the bedroom a bedlam around her, a tired reprise of the havoc wreaked in the rooms of Donald Renninger and Albert Weinberg, the searcher run amok, the quest for 750 G’s reaching a climax of desperation. The police had not found what they’d wanted in Gerry’s safe, and they wondered now if whoever had demolished Gerry’s apartment and strangled her into the bargain had had any better luck than they.
Arthur Brown went out into the hallway and, oddly, wondered if Gerry had ever roller-skated on a city sidewalk.
They picked up Bramley Kahn in a gay bar that night.
He was wearing a brocade Nehru jacket over white linen hiphuggers. His hand was resting on the shoulder of a curly-haired young man in a black leather jacket. A sculpted gold ring set with a gray freshwater pearl was on Kahn’s left pinky.
He was slightly drunk, and decidedly campy, and he seemed surprised to see the police. Everywhere around him, men danced with men, men whispered to men, men embraced men, but Kahn was nonetheless surprised to see the police because this was the most permissive city in the world, where private homosexual clubs could expressly prohibit policemen from entering (unless of course they, too, were members) and where everyone looked the other way unless a six-year-old boy was being buggered by a flying queen in a dark alley. This was just a run-of-the-mill gay bar, never any trouble here, never any strident jealous arguments, never anything more than consenting adults quietly doing their thing — Kahn was very surprised to see the police.
He was even more surprised to learn that Geraldine Ferguson was dead.
He kept telling the police how surprised he was.
This was a Tuesday, he kept telling the police, and Tuesday was normally Gerry’s day off; she took Tuesdays, he took Wednesdays. He had not expected to see her at the gallery and was not surprised when she did not show up for work. He had closed the gallery at six, had gone for a quiet dinner with a close friend, and then had come down here to The Quarter for a nightcap before turning in. Arthur Brown asked him if he would mind coming uptown to the squadroom, and Kahn said he could see no objection to that, though perhaps he had better first consult his lawyer. Brown said he was entitled to a lawyer, and in fact didn’t have to answer any questions at all if he didn’t want to, lawyer or no lawyer, and then went into the whole Miranda-Escobedo bit, advising Kahn of his rights while Kahn listened intently, and then decided that he had better call his lawyer and have him come up to the squadroom to be present during the interrogation, murder being a somewhat serious occurrence, even in a city as permissive as this one.
The lawyer was a man named Anatole Petitpas, and he asked Brown to do the whole Miranda-Escobedo song and dance one more time for the benefit of the people in the cheaper seats. Brown patiently explained Kahn’s rights to him again, and Kahn said that he understood everything, and Petitpas seemed satisfied that all was being conducted in a proper legal manner, and then he signaled to the detectives that it was now all right to ask his client whatever questions they chose to ask. There were four detectives standing in a loose circle around Kahn, but their weight of numbers was offset by the presence of Petitpas, who could be counted on to leap into the fray if ever the questioning got too rough. This was murder they were fooling around with here, and nobody was taking any chances.
They asked all the routine questions (almost putting even themselves to sleep) such as WHERE WERE YOU AT TWO A.M. LAST NIGHT? (the time established by the ME as the probable time of Gerry’s death) and WHO WAS WITH YOU? and WHERE DID YOU GO? and WERE YOU SEEN BY ANYONE? all the usual police crap, the questions coming alternately from Brown, Carella, Meyer, and Hawes working smoothly and efficiently as a team. And then finally they got back to the photograph, everything always got back to the photograph because it was obvious to each of the cops in that squadroom that four people had been killed so far and that all of them had been in possession of a piece or pieces of a picture showing the location of the NSLA loot, and if a motive were any more evident than that, each of them would have tripped over it with his big flat feet.