He walked around the boulder to pick it up.
The coat was thrown carelessly on the ground behind the boulder. A girl was lying on her back not three feet from the coat, staring up at the darkening sky. The girl’s eyes and mouth were open. She was wearing a gray skirt, and the skirt was drenched with blood. Dried blood had stained her exposed thighs and her legs. She was no more than sixteen or seventeen years old.
The patrolman, who had seen death before, knew he was looking at a corpse.
He had no way of knowing the corpse was named Eileen Glennon.
Chapter 11
A corpse has no rights.
If you are a corpse, they can take your picture from a hundred unflattering angles as you stare up unseeingly at the popping flash guns, your skirt pulled back to reveal the dried and caked blood on the inside of your thighs and legs, the last flies of summer swarming about your open mouth. They can press their thumbs into your eyes at last to close your lids, and they can pull your skirt down over your knees and mark the position of your body on the shelf of flat rock where you lay motionless behind the trees. They can roll you onto a stretcher and carry you down to the waiting ambulance, the stretcher bouncing as they move along; they are not concerned for your comfort — you are beyond feeling. They can put the stretcher down on the floor of the ambulance with a sudden jolt and then cover you with a sheet — your waist, your young breasts, your throat, your face. You have no rights.
If you are a corpse, they can take off your clothing and put it into a plastic bag, and tag it, and send it to the police laboratory. They can place your cold and naked body on a stainlesssteel table and dissect you in search of a cause of death. You have no rights. You are a corpse, a stiff, a container of clues perhaps, but no longer a person; you have forfeited your rights — forfeited them to death.
If you are a junkie, you have more rights than a corpse — but not many more.
You can still walk and breathe and sleep and laugh and cry — which is something. These things are life — they are not things to be discounted — and you can still do these things. But if you are a junkie you are involved in your own brand of living death, and you are not very much better off than a bona fide corpse. Your death is continuous and persistent. It starts every morning when you wake up and take that first shot, and it continues throughout the day-long hustle for heroin, punctured by the other death-giving shots, or through the night and into another morning, over and over again, you’re a record player spinning the same tired mournful dirge, and the needle is stuck — in your arm. You know you’re dead, and everybody else knows it, too.
Especially the cops.
While the corpse named Eileen Glennon was being disrobed and then dissected, a drug addict named Michael Pine was being questioned in the squadroom of the 87th Precinct. His questioner was a cop named Hal Willis who could take junkies or leave them alone but whose preference was to leave them alone. A lot has been said about the psychology of the drug addict, but Hal Willis wasn’t a psychologist, he was only a cop. He was a disciplined cop who had learned judo because he was only five feet eight inches tall and because he had learned at an early age that big guys like to push around little guys unless little guys learn how to push back. Judo was an exact science and a disciplined one. Drug addiction, so far as Willis was concerned, was the ultimate in lack of discipline. He didn’t like junkies, but only because it seemed to him that they didn’t have to be junkies. He knew with certainty that if he were ever hooked on heroin, he could kick the habit in a week. He would lock himself in a room and puke out his guts, but he would kick it. Discipline. He didn’t hate junkies, and he didn’t pity them; he simply felt they were lacking in self-control, and this to Willis was unforgivable.
“You knew La Scala, huh?” he said to Pine.
“Yeah,” Pine answered. He delivered the word quickly and curtly. No wise-guy intonation, no enthusiasm, just “Yeah,” like the sharp rap of a knuckle on wood.
“Know him long?”
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
“He’s been a junkie all that time?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know he’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know how he died?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?”
Pine shrugged. He was twenty-three years old, a blond boy with blue eyes that seemed wide and staring, partially because he’d had a shot before they picked him up and the dilated pupils gave his eyes a weird look and partially because the skin under his eyes was dark, making the blue of the pupils more startling.
“Anybody after him?” Willis asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know his pusher?”
Pine did not answer.
“I asked you a question. Do you know who La Scala’s pusher was?”
“No.”
“That’s a lie,” Willis said. “He’s probably the same crumb you use.”
Pine still would not answer.
“That’s right,” Willis said, “protect the pusher. That’s the smart thing. You scrape together all your nickels and dimes. Go ahead. Make the pusher fat. And then protect him, so he can go right on sucking your blood. You goddamn fool, who’s the pusher?”
Pine did not answer.
“Okay. Did La Scala owe him any money?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“You’re a cop,” Pine said. “You know all about how fat pushers are, don’t you? Then you also know they take cash on the line. No. Tony didn’t owe the connection nothing.”
“Got any ideas who killed him?”
“I don’t have any ideas,” Pine said.
“You high now?”
“I’m a little drowsy, that’s all,” Pine said.
“When did you have your last shot?”
“About an hour ago?”
“Who’s your connection, Pine?”
“Aw, come on, cop,” Pine said. “What’s he gonna bother with knocking off a guy like Tony for, huh? That’s stupid, ain’t it? Would you knock off a customer?”
“How bad was Tony hooked?”
“Through the bag and back again.”
“How much did he spend every day?”
“Twenty-five bucks, maybe three bills, maybe more, I don’t know. Whatever it was, his connection sure as hell wasn’t gonna lose it by knocking him off. Besides, what’s the reason?” Pine smiled thinly. “Pushers like hopheads, don’t you know that?”
“Yeah, they like ‘em,” Willis said dryly. “All right, tell me everything you know about La Scala. How old was he?”
“About my age. Twenty-three, twenty-four.”
“Married? Single?”
“Single.”
“Parents living?”
“I think so. But not here.”
“Where?”
“The coast, I think. I think his old man is in pictures.”
“What do you mean, pictures? La Scala’s father is a movie star?”
“Yeah, just like my father is a movie star,” Pine said. “My father’s Cary Grant. You didn’t know that?”
“Don’t get wise,” Willis said. “What does La Scala’s father do?”
“Something with the crew. A grip, a shmip, who knows? He works with the crew.”
“Does he know his son is dead?”
“I doubt it. Nobody in LA reads newspapers.”
“How the hell would you know?”