“Which homes did she visit?”
“What?”
“Which homes did she—”
“Oh, I’m not sure. Several. I can’t remember.”
“Try.”
“Really...”
“Try.”
“Oh, let me see. There was a man in, several months back, had broken his leg on the job. Claire took an interest in his family, visited the home, helped the children. Or the beginning of last month, for example. We had a woman in with a ruptured appendix. Quite a mess, believe me. Peritonitis, subdiaphragmatic abscess, the works. She was here quite a while — just released last week, as a matter of fact. Claire got very friendly with her young daughter, a girl of about sixteen. Even kept up her interest after the woman was discharged.”
“What do you mean?”
“She called her.”
“The young girl? She called her from here? From the ward?”
“Yes.”
“What did she talk about?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I’m not in the habit of listening to other people’s—”
“How often did she call her?”
“Well... quite frequently this past week.” McElroy paused. “In fact, the girl called her once. Right here.”
“She did, huh? What’s the girl’s name?”
“I don’t know. I can get you the mother’s name. That would be in our records.”
“Yes, would you please?” Carella said.
“This is a little unusual, isn’t it?” Meyer asked. “Keeping up contact with a woman’s daughter after the woman’s been released?”
“No, not terribly unusual. Most social workers do a followup. And as I said, Claire was a very conscientious—”
“But would you say there was a personal involvement with this young girl?”
“All of Claire’s involvements—”
“Please, Dr. McElroy, I think you know what I mean. Was Claire Townsend’s interest in this young girl more than the interest she usually expressed in a patient or the family of a patient?”
McElroy thought this one over for a few minutes. Then he said, “Yes, I would say so.”
“Good. May we look at those records now, please?”
Back at the squad, Detective Hal Willis was studying a necropsy report made on the dead body of Anthony La Scala. The report informed him that the cause of death had been three .45-caliber bullets in the lungs and heart and that death had most probably been instantaneous. But the report also mentioned the fact that both of La Scala’s arms were scarred around the superficial veins on the flexor surface of the forearm and the bend of the elbow. These scars appeared to be short ropelike thickenings of the dermis from three-eighths of an inch to one inch in length and about three-sixteenths of an inch wide. It was the opinion of the medical examiner, strongly bolstered by a large amount of heroin found in La Scala’s blood stream, that the marks on his arms were mainline scars, that La Scala had injected the drug intravenously, and that he had undoubtedly been addicted to the drug for a good long time, judging from the number of scars and the tiny dots arranged seriatim on the thickened areas.
Willis put the report into the Kling Case folder and then said to Brown, who was sitting at the next desk, “That’s great, ain’t it? A goddamn hophead. How do we find out where a hophead was living? Probably in Grover Park underneath a goddamn bench! How do we find the friends and relatives of a goddamn hophead?”
Brown considered this pensively for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe it’s a break, Hal. This may have been the one he wanted. Hopheads get mixed up in a lot of crazy things.” He nodded again, emphatically. “Maybe this is a break.”
And maybe it was.
Chapter 9
Monday morning came.
It always does.
On Monday morning you sit back and take a look at things, and things look lousy. That’s a part of Monday, the nature of the beast. Monday should be a fresh beginning, a sort of road-company New Year’s Day. But, somehow, Monday is only and always a continuation, a familiar awakening to a start that is really only a repetition. There should be laws against Monday morning.
Arthur Brown didn’t like Monday morning any more than anyone else did. He was a cop, and only incidentally a Negro, and he lived in a colored ghetto close to the office. He had a wife named Caroline, and a daughter named Connie, and they shared a four-room flat in a building weary with time. Happily, when Brown got out of bed on the morning of October 16, the floors were not cold. The floors were usually cold around this time of year, despite the city ordinance that made it mandatory to provide steam heat beginning on the fifteenth of October. This year, with Indian summer swinging her hot little behind through the city, the landlords were enjoying a reprieve, and the tenants didn’t have to bang on the radiators. Brown was grateful for the warm floors.
He got out of bed quietly, not wanting to wake Caroline, who was asleep beside him. He was a big man with close-cropped black hair and brown eyes and a deep-brown complexion. He had worked on the docks before he joined the force, and his arms and shoulders and chest still bulged with the muscles of his youthful labor. He had been sleeping in his pajama bottoms, Caroline curled beside him in the over-large top. After he silently slipped out of bed, he walked bare-chested into the kitchen, where he filled a kettle with water and put it on the stove. He turned on the radio very softly and listened to the news broadcast as he shaved. Race riots in the Congo. Sit-in demonstrations in the South. Apartheid in South Africa.
He wondered why he was black.
He often wondered this. He wondered if idly, and with no real conviction, that he was black. That was the strange part of it. When Arthur Brown looked in the mirror, he saw only himself. Now he knew he was a Negro, yes. But he was also a Democrat, and a detective, and a husband, and a father, and he read The New York Times — he was a lot of things. And so he wondered why he was black. He wondered why, being this variety of things besides being black, people would look at him and see Arthur Brown, Negro — and not Arthur Brown, detective, or Arthur Brown, husband, or any of the Arthur Browns who had nothing to do with the fact that he was black. This was not a simple concept, and Brown did not equate it in simple Shakespearian-Shylock terms, which the world had long outgrown.
When Brown looked into his mirror he saw a person.
It was the world who had decided that this person was a black man. Being this person was an extremely difficult thing, because it meant living a life the world had decided upon, and not the life he — Arthur Brown — would particularly have chosen. He, Arthur Brown, did not see a black man or a white man or a yellow man or a chartreuse man when he looked into his mirror.
He saw Arthur Brown.
He saw himself.
But superimposed upon this image of himself was the external concept of black man-white man, a concept that existed and that Brown was forced to accept. He became a person playing a complicated role. He looked at himself and saw Arthur Brown, Man. That’s all he wanted to be. He had no desire to be white. In fact, he rather liked the warm, burnished color of his own skin. He had no desire to go to bed with a creamy-skinned blonde. He had heard colored friends of his state that white men had bigger sex organs than Negroes, but he didn’t believe it, and he felt no envy. He had encountered prejudice in 101 subtle and unsubtle ways from the moment he was old enough to understand what was being said and done around him, but the intolerance never left him feeling angry — it only confused him.