“Did you mold them?”
“Yes,” Elliot said.
“I suppose you keep them in here so they won’t melt.”
“Brilliant.”
“Why do you keep them at all?”
“I made up a batch from rubber molds,” Elliot said. “I use them as prototypes, changing them to fit a specific pose.”
Carella nodded, closed the refrigerator, and began wandering the studio again. He found what he thought was a packing crate, but when he lifted the lid he discovered that Elliot stored his clothes in it. He kneeled and began going through the crate, being careful not to disturb the order in which blue jeans and sweaters, shirts and socks, underwear and jackets were arranged. A single sandal was in the crate, the mate to the one Elliot was now wearing. There were also two pairs of loafers. But no sneaker. Carella put the lid onto the crate again.
“Why do you model in wax if it’s so perishable?” he asked.
“I told you, I only do it when I’m going to be casting in bronze.” Elliot put down the wire-end tool in his hand, turned to Carella, and patiently said, “It’s called cire perdue, the lost-wax method. A mold is made of the piece when it gets to the foundry, and then the wax is melted out, and molten bronze is poured into the mold.”
“Then the original wax piece is lost, is that right?”
“Brilliant,” Elliot said again, and picked up a fettling knife.
“What do you do when you get the bronze piece back?”
“Chisel or file off the fins, plug any holes, color it, polish it, and mount it on a marble base.”
“What’s in here?” Carella asked, indicating a closed door.
“Storage.”
“Of what?”
“Larger pieces. Most of them in plaster.”
“Mind if I take a look?”
“You’re hot stuff, you know that?” Elliot said. “You come around with a search warrant, and then you go through the charade of asking me whether or not you can...”
“No sense being uncivilized about it, is there?”
“Why not? I thought you were investigating a murder.”
“I didn’t think you realized that, Mr. Elliot.”
“I realize it fine. And I’ve already told you I don’t know who the dead man...”
“Yes, you’ve already told me. The trouble is, I don’t happen to believe you.”
“Then don’t be so fucking polite,” Elliot said. “If I’m a murder suspect, I don’t need your good manners.”
Carella went into the storage room without answering. As Elliot had promised, the room contained several larger pieces, all done in plaster, all unmistakably of Mary Margaret Ryan. A locked door was at the far end of the room. “Where’s that door go?” Carella asked.
“What?” Elliot said.
“The other door here.”
“Outside. The alley.”
“You want to unlock it for me, please?”
“I don’t have a key. I never open that door. It’s locked all the time.”
“I’ll have to kick it open then,” Carella said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to see what’s out in that alley.”
“There’s nothing out in that alley.”
There were prints in the plaster dust on the floor. Easily identifiable prints left by someone’s right foot; on either side of them, there were circular marks that might have been left by the rubber tips of crutches. The prints led directly to the alley door.
“What do you say, Elliot? Are you going to open it for me?”
“I told you I don’t have a key.”
“Fine,” Carella said, and kicked the door in without another word.
“Are you allowed to do that?” Elliot said.
“Sue me,” Carella said, and went out into the alley. A garbage can and two cardboard boxes full of trash were stacked against the brick wall. In one of the cardboard cartons Carella found the sneaker Elliot had been wearing yesterday. He came back into the studio, showed the sneaker to Elliot and said, “Ever see this before?”
“Never.”
“I figured you wouldn’t have,” Carella said. “Mr. Elliot, at the risk of sounding like a television cop, I’d like to warn you not to leave the city.”
“Where would I go?” Elliot asked.
“Who knows? You seem to have a penchant for Boston. Take my advice and stay put till I get back to you.”
“What do you hope to get from a fucking moldy sneaker?” Elliot said.
“Maybe some wax that didn’t get lost,” Carella answered.
The cop who picked up the surveillance of Frederick Lipton at five o’clock that evening was Cotton Hawes. From his parked sedan across the street from the real estate office, he watched Lipton as he locked up the place and walked down the block to where his Ford convertible was parked. He followed him at a safe distance to a garden apartment a mile and a half from the real estate office, and waited outside for the next four hours, at which time Lipton emerged, got into his Ford again, and drove to a bar imaginatively named the Gee-Gee-Go-Go. Since Lipton had never met Hawes and did not know what he looked like, and also since the place advertised topless dancers, Hawes figured he might as well step inside and continue the surveillance there. The place was no more disappointing than he expected it to be. Topless dancing, in this city, was something more than topless — the something more being pasties or filmy brassieres. Hookers freely roamed the streets and plied their trade, but God forbid a mammary gland should be exposed to some unsuspecting visitor from Sioux City. The dancers, nonetheless, were usually young and attractive, gyrating wildly to canned rock music while the equivalent of front-row center in a burlesque house ogled them from stools lining the bar. Not so at the Gee-Gee-Go-Go. The dancers here were thirtyish or better, considerably over the hill for the kind of acrobatics they performed or the kind of erotic response they attempted to provoke. Hawes sat in bored silence while the elaborate electronics system buffeted him with waves of amplified sound and the dancers, four in all, came out in succession to grind away in tempo along the length of the bar. Keeping one eye on Lipton, who sat at the other end of the bar, Hawes speculated that the sound system had cost more than the dancing girls, but this was Calm’s Point and not Isola; one settled for whatever he could get in the city’s hinterlands.
Lipton seemed to know one of the dancers, a woman of about thirty-five, with bleached blond hair and siliconed breasts tipped with star-shaped pasties, ample buttocks, rather resembling in build one of the sturdy Clydesdale horses in the Rheingold commercials. When she finished her number, she kneeled down beside him on the bar top, chatted with him briefly, and then went to join him at a table in the rear of the place. Lipton ordered a drink for the girl, and they talked together for perhaps a half hour, at the end of which time she clambered onto the bar top again to hurl some more beef at her audience, all of whom watched her every move in pop-eyed fascination, as though privileged to be witnessing Markova at a command performance of Swan Lake. Lipton settled his bill and left the bar. Without much regret, Hawes followed him back to the garden apartment, where he put his car into one of a row of single garages on the ground level of the building, and then went upstairs. Figuring he was home for the night, Hawes drove back to the Gee-Gee-Go-Go, ordered a scotch and soda, and waited for an opportunity to engage the beefy blonde in conversation.
He caught her after she finished her number, a tiresome repetition of the last three, or five, or fifty numbers she had performed on the bar top. She was heading either for the ladies’ room or a dressing room behind the bar when he stepped into her path, smiled politely, and said, “I like the way you dance. May I buy you a drink?”