“Good afternoon,” he said, “may I help you?”
He was wearing a brown business suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie. A local Chamber of Commerce pin was in his lapel, and the tops of several cigars protruded from the breast pocket of his jacket.
“I hope so,” Kling said. He took out his wallet, and opened it. “I’m Detective Kling,” he said, “87th Squad. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Have a seat,” the man answered, and indicated the wooden chair alongside his desk. “I’m Fred Lipton, be happy to help you any way I can.”
“Mr. Lipton, one of your company pens was found at the scene of a burglary, and we...”
“Company pens?”
“Yes, sir. The name of the company lettered on the barrel.”
“Oh, yes. Those. The ones Nat bought to advertise the business.”
“Nat?”
“Nat Sulzbacher. He owns the company. I’m just a salesman.” Lipton opened the top drawer of his desk, reached into it, opened his hand, and dropped a half-dozen ballpoint pens onto the desk top. “Are these the ones you mean?”
Kling picked one up and looked at it. “Yes,” he said, “a pen similar to these.”
The front door opened, and a tall, dark-haired man entered the room. “Afternoon, Fred,” he said. “Selling lots of houses?”
“Mr. Sulzbacher, this is Detective...”
“Kling.”
“Kling. He’s investigating a burglary.”
“Yeah?” Sulzbacher said, and raised his eyebrows in appreciation.
“They found one of our pens at the scene of the crime.”
“One of ours?” Sulzbacher said. “May I see it, please?”
“I don’t have it with me right now.”
“Then how do I know it’s ours?”
“Our name’s on it,” Lipton said.
“Oh. So what would you like to know, young man?”
“Since the pen was found at the scene of a crime...”
“You don’t think we’re criminals here, do you?”
“No. I was merely wondering...”
“Because if that’s what you think, you’re mistaken. We’re real estate agents here. That’s what we are.”
“No one’s suggesting you or Mr. Lipton burglarized an apartment. All I wanted to know is whether you give these pens to anybody special, or whether...”
“You know how many of these pens I ordered?” Sulzbacher asked.
“How many?”
“Five thousand.”
“Oh,” Kling said.
“You know how many of them we’ve given out in the past six months? At least half that amount. Certainly two thousand, anyway. So you expect us to remember who we gave them to?”
“Were these customers or...?”
“Customers, sure, but also strangers. Somebody comes in, asks about a house, we give him a little pen so he won’t forget the name. There are a lot of real estate agents in Calm’s Point, you know.”
“Mmm,” Kling said.
“I’m sorry,” Sulzbacher said.
“Yeah,” Kling said. “Me too.”
This time, they did not think it was a mistake.
The duplicate photostat arrived in the afternoon mail, and was promptly added to the gallery on the bulletin board, so that the squad now proudly possessed two pictures of J. Edgar Hoover and two pictures of George Washington.
“What do you think he’s driving at?” Hawes asked.
“I don’t know,” Carella said.
“It’s deliberate, that’s for sure,” Meyer said.
“No question.”
The three men stood before the bulletin board, hands on hips, studying the photostats as though they were hanging on the wall of a museum.
“Where do you suppose he got the pictures?” Hawes asked.
“Newspapers, I would guess. Books. Magazines.”
“Any help for us there?”
“I doubt it. Even if we located the source, what good...?”
“Yeah.”
“The important thing is what he’s trying to tell us.”
“What do we know so far?” Meyer asked.
“So far we know he’s going to steal half a million dollars on April thirtieth,” Hawes said.
“No, that’s not it exactly,” Carella said.
“What is it exactly?”
“He said, ‘With your assistance...’ remember? ‘With your assistance, I’m going to steal five hundred thousand dollars on the last day of April.’ ”
“Whose assistance?” Meyer asked.
“Ours, I guess,” Carella said.
“Or maybe yours personally,” Hawes said. “You’re the one he was talking to.”
“That’s right, yeah,” Carella said.
“And the pictures have all been addressed to you.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he figures you’ve got something in common. Maybe all this crap is pegged directly at you.”
“We have got something in common,” Carella said.
“What’s that?”
“We shot each other. And survived.”
“So what do you think?” Hawes said.
“What do you mean?”
“If he’s pegging it at you, what do you think? Have you got any ideas?”
“Not a single one,” Carella said.
“Hoover and Washington,” Meyer said thoughtfully. “What have they got in common?”
7
“The Jesus Case,” as it was playfully dubbed by the heathens of the 87th Squad, was going nowhere very quickly. The dead man had still not been identified, and Carella knew that, unless a positive identification was made within the next few days, the case was in danger of being buried as deep as the corpse had been. Until they knew who he was, until they could say with certainty that this man with this name was slain by person or persons unknown, why then he would remain only what Dr. Cortez had labeled him last Monday: a corpse. Labels. A corpse. Anonymous. A lifeless heap of human rubble, unmissed, unreported, unidentified when it was buried in the municipal cemetery. There were too many murder victims in the city, all of them with names and addresses and relatives and histories. It was too much to ask of any overworked police department that it should spend valuable time trying to find the murderer of someone who had namelessly roamed the streets. A cipher never evokes much sympathy.
On Thursday morning, as Carella made his way from shop to shop in the Harrison Street area, it began raining heavily. The Jesus Case was now four days old. Carella knew that, unless he came up with something soon, the case would be thrown into the squad’s Open File. For all intents and purposes, such disposition would mean that the case was closed. Not solved, merely closed until something accidentally turned up on it weeks or months or years later, if ever. The idea of burying the case a scant two days after the body itself had been buried was extremely distasteful to Carella. Aside from his revulsion for the brutality of the crucifixion (if such it could be called; there had, after all, been no cross involved), Carella suspected that something deeper within him was being touched. He had not been inside a church since the day his sister got married, more than thirteen years ago, but he felt vague stirrings now, memories of priests with thuribles, the heavy musk of incense, altar boys in white, the crucified form of Jesus Christ high above the altar. He had not been a religious child, nor was he a religious man. But the murdered man was curiously linked in his mind to the spiritual concept of someone dying for humanity, and he could not accept the idea that the man in the abandoned tenement had died for nothing at all.
The rain swept the pavements like machine-gun fire in some gray disputed no-man’s land. A jagged lance of lightning crackled across the sky, followed by a boom of thunder that rattled Carella to his shoelaces. He ran for the nearest shop, threw open the door, shook water from his trench coat, and mopped his head with a handkerchief. Only then did he look around him. He first thought he was in an art gallery having a one-man show. He then realized he was in a sculptor’s shop, the artist’s work displayed on long tables and shelves, female nudes of various sizes sculpted in wood and stone, cast in plaster and bronze. The work was quite good, or at least it seemed so to Carella. Naturalistic, almost photographic, the nudes sat or stood or lay on their sides in frozen three-dimensional realism, some of them no larger than a fist, others standing some three or four feet tall. The artist had used the same model for all of the pieces, an obviously young girl, tall and slender, with small well-formed breasts and narrow hips, long hair trailing halfway down her back. The effect was of being in a mirrored room that reflected the same girl in a dozen different poses, shrinking her to less than human size and capturing her life force in materials firmer than flesh. Carella was studying one of the statues more closely when a man came out of the back room.