“She still does,” Jenny said. “Third floor front, apartment 3A. She isn’t dead.”
“We have her picture...”
“She isn’t dead,” Jenny insisted.
“Is this Marcia Schaffer?” Carella asked, and showed her a glossy blowup the P.U. had made of one of the pictures taken at the scene. It was not a very pretty picture. Jenny flinched away from it as if she’d been struck full in the face.
“Is this Marcia Schaffer?” Carella asked again.
“It looks like her, but Marcia isn’t dead,” Jenny said.
“Is this also Marcia Schaffer?” Carella asked, and showed her the I.D. card.
“Yes, that’s Marcia, but...”
“The address on this...”
“Yes, Marcia lives here, but I know she isn’t dead.”
“How do you know that, Miss Compton?” Hawes asked.
“She’s not dead,” Jenny said.
“Miss Compton...”
“I saw her last Thursday afternoon, for Christ’s sake, she can’t...”
“She was killed sometime Thursday ni—”
“I don’t want her to be dead,” Jenny said, and suddenly burst into tears. “Shit, why’d you have to come here?”
She was ten feet tall, this girl, perhaps twenty-one years old, this woman, with city-bred smarts and a city-honed tongue, but she might have just been on her way to kindergarten class, the way she looked now, her right hand covering her face as she wept into it, the left hand clutching the book bag, standing a bit pigeon-toed, and sobbing uncontrollably while the detectives watched, saying nothing, feeling awkward and clumsy and far too overwhelmingly large for this little girl unashamedly crying in their presence.
They waited.
It was such a beautiful day.
“Aw, shit,” Jenny said, “it isn’t true, is it?”
“I’m sorry,” Carella said.
“How... how...?” She sniffled and then knelt to reach into her book bag, pulling out a package of tissues, ripping one free, blowing her nose, and then dabbing at her eyes. “What happened?” she said.
They never thought murder, unless they happened to be the ones who did the job. They always thought a car accident, or something in the subways, people were always falling under subway trains, or else an elevator shaft, there were always accidents in elevator shafts, that’s the way their minds ran when you came around telling them somebody was dead, they never thought murder. And if you told them up front that the person had been killed, if you didn’t just say the person was dead but actually specified killed, if they knew up front that a murder had been committed, they always thought gun, or knife, or poison, or bare hands, somebody beaten to death, somebody strangled to death. How did you explain that this had been a hanging? Or something made to look like a hanging? How did you explain to a twenty-one-year-old girl who was snuffling into a torn tissue that her girlfriend had been found hanging from a goddamn lamppost?
“Fracture of the upper cervical vertebrae,” Carella said, opting for what the M.E. had told him earlier this morning. “Crushing of the spinal cord.”
“Jesus!”
He still had not told Jenny that someone had done this to her friend. She looked at him searchingly now, realizing that a pair of detectives would not be on the doorstep asking questions if this had been a simple accident, recognizing at last that someone had caused Marcia Schaffer’s death.
“Someone killed her, is that it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Thursday night sometime. The Medical Examiner’s estimate puts it at around seven o’clock.”
“Jesus,” she said again.
“You didn’t see her at all on Thursday night?” Hawes asked.
“No.”
“Did she mention any plans she might have had for that night?”
“No. Where... where did this happen?”
“We don’t know.”
“I mean... where did you find her?”
“Uptown.”
“In the street? Somebody attacked her in the street?”
Carella sighed.
“She was hanging from a lamppost,” he said.
“Oh, God!” Jenny said, and began sobbing again.
4
Daniel McLaughlin was a rotund little man in his late fifties, wearing dark slacks and brown shoes, a very loud sports jacket, a peach-colored shirt, a tie that looked as if it had been designed by Jackson Pollock (and further abstracted by various food stains), and a dark brown summer straw hat with a narrow brim and a feather that matched the shirt. He seemed out of breath, his face mottled and perspiring, when he came up to the detectives, who were waiting for him on the front stoop. His little brown eyes checked them out briefly, and then flicked to the overflowing garbage cans stacked near the wrought iron railing that surrounded an area below pavement level. He seemed pleased to note that the garbage cans were spilling all sorts of debris onto the sidewalk.
They had learned from Jenny that Marcia Schaffer had moved into her rent-controlled apartment at about the same time Jenny had, more than two years ago when both girls were starting at Ramsey U on athletic scholarships. Before then, Marcia had indeed lived in a small town in Kansas, not Buffalo Dung — as Jenny had earlier remarked when everything was still light and jovial and unclouded by information of violent death — but instead a place named Manhattan, which called itself The Little Apple. Carella and Hawes guessed there really was a place called Manhattan, Kansas.
According to Jenny, the owner of the building — the selfsame Daniel McLaughlin who now stood admiring the shit spilling from his garbage cans — had been trying for the past year or more to get all of his tenants out of the building so that he could divide his big old-fashioned apartments into smaller units and thereby realize greater revenues. Thus far, he’d been largely unsuccessful. Save for a little old lady who’d moved to a nursing home, the rest of his tenants flatly refused to budge from a neighborhood that had suddenly become chic, enjoying rents that were impossible to find except in the worst sections of the city, of which there were many. In an attempt to dislodge lodgers who seemed determined to stay lodged, McLaughlin had first yanked out his superintendent, and then had begun a highly creative personal management that last year had resulted in the water being turned off at odd hours, garbage going uncollected, and heat not being provided by October 15, as specified by law in this city. Today was only the eleventh of October; it remained to be seen whether this year, the heat would be turned on as decreed, although the mild weather made the question somewhat academic. Meanwhile, there was garbage all over the sidewalk.
“You the detectives?” McLaughlin asked, coming up the steps.
“Mr. McLaughlin?” Carella said.
“Yeah.” He did not offer his hand. “I’ve got to tell you I don’t appreciate coming all the way up here to deliver a goddamn key.”
“No other way to get in the apartment,” Hawes said.
They had called him just before they’d gone to lunch in a greasy spoon around the corner, even though the neighborhood was brimming with good French restaurants. Each of them had eaten hamburgers and French fries, washed down with Cokes. During lunch, Carella had meant to ask Hawes why the Indian had bought a hat, but he was preoccupied with the thought that a cop’s normal working-day diet was nothing the great chefs of Europe would care to write home about. It was now one o’clock in the afternoon, and Daniel McLaughlin was complaining he’d had to come “all the way up here” from his office six blocks away.