"But who's giving you the money?" MacArdle had asked Herb down in Records that day. Herb had done this sort of thing before. Not with fox, but with other key words. From time to time over the years, Herb, who'd made a career out of the 37th precinct's records, would receive a telephone call. At first he thought the lemony-sounding voice was some kind of crank, but since he had nothing to lose, he'd added the 9 to the appropriate documents just to see what would happen. What had happened was that he'd gotten a check for each report he'd put through the computer with a 9 on it. No strings. No questions. Just money.
"I don't know," Herb answered. "But it ain't the Mafia sending me U.S. government checks. My guess is the CIA."
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"What? You've got to be crazy. What's the CIA want with foxes?"
"Who knows?" Herb said. "Maybe there's foxes with rabies in New York, and the CIA wants to catch them on the Q.T. All I know is they're in a hurry this time and can't wait for the reports to come down to Records through the usual channels. That's why you got to stamp every one that says 'fox' and bring it down here yourself. Got it?"
MacArdle was skeptical. "I still don't see why the CIA's so interested in this precinct."
"Don't kid yourself, kid," Herb said. "I got a friend uptown who's got a stamp just like this one. We make them up ourselves, just like the way the guy on the phone says, and when the first check comes, there's even extra to take care of the cost of the stamp. If that ain't government regulation, I don't know what is."
And so Gary MacArdle had taken the stamp and carried it with him on his beat and stayed on for overtime and had eaten supper at his desk, just in case any "fox" reports turned up, and now he slammed the desk drawer shut with a bang because any fool knew there weren't any foxes in Manhattan.
And then Doris Dumbroski came in.
She was a frowzy redhead with enough pancake on her face to turn the Hudson River orange, and she was screaming at the desk sergeant.
"What kind of a dump is this joint? What are all you bums doing around here instead of fighting crime out on the street where you belong?"
"Take it easy," the desk sergeant replied wearily. He'd been on overtime all week, too. "What's the problem?"
The redhead banged her fist on the desk. "The problem is that my roommate's been missing for ten
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days, and you yo-yos are hanging around here like you're waiting for a beer."
"Have you filed a missing persons report?" the sergeant asked.
"Yes, I filed a missing persons report," she mimicked. "Last week. One day after Irma disappeared. You don't even remember. How can taxpayers be expected to-"
"We get a lot of missing persons in New York City, ma'am," the sergeant said. He picked up a pencil and began to write. "Name?"
"Whose?"
"Yours."
"Doris Dumbroski."
The sergeant looked up from the paper. "Oh, yeah, I remember. The stripper."
"Watch it. I'm an exotic dancer." She pouffed her hair elaborately.
"Right," the sergeant said. "At the Pink Pussycat. Who's your friend? The one that's missing."
"Her name's irma Schwartz, same as it was last week," Doris said.
"Okay, just a second." He leafed through a stack of papers on his desk. "Schwartz, Schwartz . . ."
"What's in those?" Doris asked.
"Homicides. Schwartz . . . Irma." The sergeant looked up from the paper. "Sorry, lady," he said. "Her name's down here."
Doris stared at him, her mouth sprung open. "A homicide? Like in ... she was murdered?"
"Looks that way, lady. Sorry. She had I.D. on her, but she hasn't been identified personally yet. Just came in this afternoon. Somebody from the morgue should have called you."
"I ain't been home," Doris said numbly. "I didn't
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think she'd be murdered, for pete's sake. Just maybe tied up with a fink,"
"I guess she was," the sergeant said.
Doris Dumbroski's eyes welled up. "Okay, so what do I do now?" she choked.
The desk sergeant was solicitous. He'd seen a lot of this. "Well, if you don't mind, I'd like you to go down to the morgue with one of the police officers. If the deceased is your roommate, the officer'll fill out a homicide report. That okay with you?"
"Sure," she said lamely. "Only I can't believe Irma's dead. I mean, like she was so full of life, you know?"
"They all are," the sergeant said. "Hey, one of you guys want to take the lady to the morgue for an I.D.?"
There were no volunteers. Just about everybody on the floor was on overtime, and nobody felt like hanging around in the morgue for a grief-stricken identification and then filling out an interminable report that would drag on into the next shift.
"I mean, it was her lucky day," Doris went on.
"Depends on how you look at things, I guess," the sergeant said.
"I mean, there we was at the TV studio, and then all of a sudden Irma and Dr. Foxx were making eyes at each other, and then she was riding off in his limousine and everything. . . ."
Patrolman MacArdle dropped the rubber stamp he was toying with. "Fox?" he shouted, jumping up. "What about a fox?"
"Dr. Foxx, with two x's. The diet doctor. That's who Irma went off with.''
"When?"
"Monday. The last time I saw her."
The desk sergeant wrote down the name.
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"I'd like to take care of this, sir," MacArdle said.
"Gonna have to take her down to the morgue, fill out the report," the sergeant said. "Your shift's almost up. Sure you want this?"
"I'm sure, sir. His name was Foxx, wasn't it?" he asked Doris.
"With two x's. He had such cute buns and everything. I mean, like, there was this chemistry between them. . . ."
"Patrolman MacArdle will take everything down," the sergeant said.
"Yes, sir," MacArdle said. The stamp was in his pocket. "Come with me, ma'am."
Doris Dumbroski sniffed and dabbed at the black smears around her eyes. "At least Irma wasn't in pain when she went," she said.
"That's good," MacArdle said sympathetically. "Wait a second. How do you know that?"
Doris sniffed. "Because she was never in pain. She was just one of those people. She never felt pain. Whoever killed her didn't hurt her. Poor irma."
MacArdle led her out. Every last word Doris Dumbroski said was going to go into that report. It would be the fattest, fullest, best-typed report the CIA or the Mafia or whoever was handing out those checks had ever received. Happy days were here again.
Chapter Seven
The triple-zero mode was operating. Smith sat back at his console, while the Folcroft computers quietly sifted through the accumulated reports mentioning the name Foxx, from 257 police precincts around the country.
The computer had arranged the material according to Smith's programming and took out most of the dross automatically: The foxes, Phochses, and one-x Foxes were eliminated with whirring efficiency. The rest-the Foxxes ticketed for traffic violations, arrested for juvenile crimes, or reported as accident fatalities-had to be scrupulously, tediously scrutinized by Smith himself. He sat stone still at the console, afraid to blink, while he scanned the screen for each entry, pressing the "discard" button for every Foxx with nothing to offer.
His eyes burned. He took off his glasses for a moment and rubbed his face with a handkerchief. Then he opened them and scanned the entry on the screen. He pressed "Hold" and read the entry again.
"FOXX, FELIX, M.D. LAST SEEN WITH HOMICIDE VICTIM SCHWARTZ, IRMA L."
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Smith keyed in the code. "PLEASE GIVE CAUSE OF DEATH."
The computer whirred for a moment, then flashed its version of Irma Schwartz's demise onto the screen. "SCHWARTZ, IRMA L. DEATH CAUSED BY ADMINISTRATION OF HCN THROUGH NASAL CANAL."