Kling knelt beside her. Oddly, the titles of the books registered on his mind: Patterns of Culture and The Sane Society and Interviewing: Its Principles and Methods. He saw suddenly that the blouse was not a red blouse at all. A corner that had pulled free from the black skirt showed white. There were two enormous holes in the girl’s side, and the blood had poured steadily from those wounds, staining the white blouse a bright red. A string of tiny pearls had broken when she had fallen, and the pearls lay scattered on the floor now, tiny luminescent islands in the sticky coagulation of her blood. He felt pain looking at her. He reached for the book that had fallen open over her face. He lifted the book, and the pain suddenly became a very personal, very involved thing.
“Oh my Jesus Christ!” he said.
There was something in his voice that caused Steve Carella to run toward the back of the shop immediately. And then he heard Kling’s cry, a single sharp anguished cry that pierced the dustfilled, cordite-stinking air of the shop.
“Claire!”
He was holding the dead girl in his arms when Carella reached him. His hands and his face were covered with Claire Townsend’s blood, and he kissed her lifeless eyes and her nose and her throat, and he kept murmuring over and over again, “Claire, Claire,” and Steve Carella would remember that name and the sound of Kling’s voice as long as he lived.
Chapter 2
Detective-lieutenant Peter Byrnes was having dinner with his wife and his son when Carella called him. Harriet, who had been a policeman’s wife for a long time, knew immediately that it was someone from the squad. The men of the 87th called only when the family was in the middle of dinner. No, that wasn’t quite true. They sometimes called in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep.
She said, “I’ll get it,” and she rose from the table and walked into the foyer, where the telephone rested on the hall table. When she recognized Carella’s voice, she immediately smiled. She could still remember clearly a time not so long ago when Carella had been very personally involved in a situation that had threatened the entire Byrnes family. While investigating the case, Carella had been shot in Grover Park by a narcotics peddler, and she could remember that long Christmas Eve vigil when it seemed he would die. He had lived, and now when she heard his voice she smiled immediately and unconsciously, as if constantly pleased and surprised and grateful for his presence.
“Harriet,” he said, “may I talk to Pete, please?”
There was an undertone of urgency to his voice. She said simply, “Of course, Steve,” and walked instantly from the phone and into the dining room. She said, “It’s Steve.”
Byrnes pushed back his chair. He was a compact man who moved economically, his movements seeming to be a direct translation of thought into energy. The chair went back, his napkin came down onto the table, he moved briskly and rapidly to the phone, picked up the receiver, spoke the instant it was close to his mouth.
“Yeah, Steve?”
“Pete, I... I...”
“What’s the matter?”
“Pete...”
“What is it, Steve?”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. For a moment Byrnes thought Carella was... crying? He held the phone close to his ear, listening, waiting. A slight tic began near his left eye.
“Pete, I’m... I’m at a bookshop on Culver and... and...”
There was a pause. Byrnes waited. He could hear Carella asking someone where the bookshop was. He could hear a muffled voice giving Carella the information.
“North Forty-ninth,” Carella said into the phone. “The name is The Brow... The Browser. That’s the name of the shop, Pete.”
“All right, Steve,” Byrnes said. He waited.
“Pete, I think you better come down here.”
“All right, Steve,” Byrnes said. Still he waited.
“Pete, I... I can’t handle this right now. Kling is... Pete, this is a terrible thing.”
“What happened?” Byrnes asked gently.
“Somebody came in... and... sh... shot up the store. Kl... Kl... Kl... Kl...”
He could not get the word out. The stammering filled the line like subdued machine-gun fire. Click, click, click, click, and Byrnes waited. There was silence.
In a rush, Carella said, “Kling’s girl was here. She’s dead.”
Byrnes caught his breath in a quick, small rush. “I’ll be right there,” he said, and he hung up rapidly. For a moment, he felt only intense relief. He had expected worse: he had expected injury to Carella’s wife or children. But the relief was short-lived because it was followed immediately by guilt. Kling’s girl, he thought, and he tried to construct an image of her; but he’d never met her. And yet she seemed real to him because he had heard the squadroom jokes about Kling’s romance with the young social worker, the corny goddamn squadroom jokes... She was dead... Kling...
There.
There was the thing. His first concern had been for Carella, because he looked upon him as the eldest son in a family business. But now he thought of Kling, young and blond and wideeyed in a business where you could not flinch.
Byrnes did not want to think this way. I’m a cop, he told himself; I run a squad, I’m the boss, I’m the skipper, I’m the old man, they call me the old man. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t get involved with the personal lives of the men on that squad, I am not their father, goddamn it!
But he strapped on his gun, and he put on his hat, and he kissed Harriet and touched his real son, Larry, on the shoulder, and there was a troubled and concerned look on his face as he went out of the house because he was involved with these men, had been involved with them for a long time now, and maybe this involvement did not make him a better cop, but it most certainly made him a better man.
There were six detectives from the 87th waiting outside the bookshop when Byrnes got there. Meyer Meyer had been relieved and had brought two men from the oncoming graveyard shift with him. Cotton Hawes and Andy Parker had been off duty, but the catcher on the graveyard shift had called to tell them what had happened, and they had rushed over to the bookstore. Bob O’Brien had been on special assignment in a barbershop four blocks away when a patrolman had brought him the news. He had run all the way to the bookstore.
The men stood on the sidewalk uneasily as Byrnes got out of his car. Two of the men had every right to be there since they were technically manning the squadroom. The rest were there voluntarily, and they stood in the slightly stupid posture of volunteers everywhere, not sure why they were there, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Two Homicide cops were outside with them, smoking, chatting with the police photographer. An ambulance was at the curb and four patrol cars blocked the street. A dozen patrolmen were on the sidewalk, trying to keep back curious onlookers. A few reporters who had been hanging out in the wire room opposite Headquarters downtown had got the flash from the dispatcher manning the police radio and had come racing uptown to see what all the shouting was about.
Meyer broke away from the knot of men the moment he saw the lieutenant. He walked to him quickly and fell into step beside him.
“Where’s Steve?” Byrnes asked.
“Inside.”
“And Bert?”
“I sent him home.”