“Did they have any news, Detective Carella?” Reynolds asked.
“I was only talking to the Auto Squad.” Carella answered.
“Oh.”
“He’s all worried,” Cassidy said. “I keep tellin’ him there’s nothing to worry about. In fact, even puttin’ in this extra phone is a waste of time. The kid’ll be back before you can say Jack Robinson, it figures, don’t it?”
“Do you think so?” Reynolds asked Carella.
“Well…” Carella answered, and the doorbell rang. He rose from the phone table and went to answer it. Parker came into the room, slapping his arms against his sides.
“Whoooo!” he said. “The North Pole!”
“Cold out there?”
“Whoooo!” Parker said again. “How’s it going in here? Nice and warm in here, Stevie? You should be outside with the mad scientist.”
“What’s Kronig doing?”
“Trying to make a cast from a tire track. After that, he’ll probably dust the whole damn driveway for fingerprints. These lab boys give me a fat pain in the keester. Goddamn mad scientists. The kid’s probably dead already, anyway.”
Carella gave him a sharp poke in the ribs. “What’s the matter?” Parker asked.
Carella glanced hastily toward Reynolds, who had apparently not heard Parker’s remark. “Any sign of the lieutenant yet?” he asked.
“No, I ain’t seen him. He’s probably curled up home with his wife.” He studied Cassidy, who was trailing his lengths of colored wires across the room. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Putting in a trunk line to the phone company’s main office.”
“And what’s that?” Parker asked, pointing to the instrument set up near the telephone.
“You know damn well what that is. It’s a wiretap.”
“All baloney,” Parker said. “Wiretap, trunk line, all baloney! I never seen such a commotion in my life. I won’t be surprised we get the Chief of Detectives in here.”
“I imagine the lieutenant will call him,” Carella said.
“Sure, and for what? The lab’s outside crawling around on their hands and knees sniffing tire tracks, and the whole damn force is out checking rooming houses and hotels and motels and every fleabag in the city and the suburbs. We got dicks at both airports and covering every train station, bus terminal and trolley car stop. And I ask you, for what? Those cheap thieves got only two choices open to them.”
“Have they, Andy?”
“Damn right. They either turn the kid loose or they kill him out of spite.”
“They ought to take all kidnapers and burn them at the stake,” Cassidy said. “Man sweats his head off raising a nice family, and some guy steps in and swipes a kid. There ought to be a law.”
“You… you don’t think they’ll… harm Jeff, do you, Detective Carella?” Reynolds asked. “When they find out he isn’t the one they wanted?”
“There ain’t nobody safe nowadays, nobody,” Cassidy said. “That’s because the cops are all a bunch of—” He stopped suddenly, seemingly realizing that he was in the presence of policemen. Casually, he cleared his throat. “Maybe I better test this phone, huh?” he said. He picked up the receiver of the new phone. Impatiently, he jiggled the bar. “Hello? Hello?”
“I’m going to the kitchen for a cup of coffee,” Parker said. “You want some, Stevie?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Wiretaps, trunk lines,” Parker said disgustedly, and he walked out of the room.
“Hello,” Cassidy said into the telephone, “this is Cassidy…What?… Never mind the Hopalong wisecracks. I’m testing this Smoke Rise installation.” He listened. “Yeah… Okay. Fine. I’m finished, then. What else you got for me?” He listened, jotting an address onto a pad. “Right. So long.” He hung up. “Well, that does it.”
“All finished?”
“Just pick it up, and you’ve got our main office. You going to try tracing a call, huh?”
“If we get another call to trace.”
“I’ll let you in on something, Officer. But don’t spread it around. If your man uses a dial phone, you ain’t got a chance in hell of tracing the call. You know?”
“I know,” Carella said.
“Oh. You know. Well, you better pray he uses a manual instrument. That sounds like a dirty joke, hey, don’t it?” He chuckled to himself, took some papers from his pocket and then glanced at his watch. “Are them three gonna be eating dinner all night? I gotta get somebody to sign for this installation.”
“They should be finished soon,” Carella said.
“You never seen an outfit like this one for getting things signed,” Cassidy said. “You want to go to the toilet, you got to get somebody to sign for it, it figures, don’t it?” He shook his head. “I swear to God, one of these days, the telephone company is gonna declare war on the United States.”
“Have you heard anything yet, Detective Carella?” King said, and he came through the dining-room arch and into the living room, carrying a coffee cup in his right hand. Diane and Cameron were directly behind him.
“Not yet, Mr. King,” Carella said.
“Mr. King, I wonder if you would si—” Cassidy started.
“Well, what’s the holdup?” King said. “Are you sure your men are really looking? Do they have a description of the boy?”
“Yes, sir, they have a description.”
“Would you sign this…”
“Do they know he’ll be wandering the streets? They can’t expect the kidnapers to deliver him to our front…”
“Yes, sir, they know that.”
“Could you sign this form we…”
“Well, then, why hasn’t someone seen him? Have you got men at headquarters to take care of calls from the public? It seems likely that some citizen might…”
“That’s all taken care of, sir.”
“Mr. King, would you please sign for this installation?”
King turned to Cassidy as if just discovering a Martian in his living room. “What installation?” he asked.
“The trunk line,” Cassidy said. “To the main office.”
“What trunk line?”
“I told you about it before we had it installed, Mr. King,” Carella said.
“Oh. Oh, yes. That.”
“I have to get a few things from you first, Mr. King,” Cassidy said.
“What is it?”
“Is that the only phone in the house there? I mean, the one you had before I put in the trunk line?”
“No. We’ve got two numbers. That one, and my private line upstairs.”
“Could I have those numbers, please?”
“Smoke Rise 8-7214 and 7215,” King said.
“And that’s it, right?”
“I’ve got a phone in the car, too,” King said. “Do you want that number?”
“No, just the ones in the house. Car phone’s a separate thing. We just need a record of the lines going in, so we don’t get all fouled up with—Well, it don’t make no difference. Would you sign this slip, please?” He handed it to King.