The technicians were back. The one Carella thought was named Joe said, “You’re not fucking anything up, are you?”
The second technician put his gear down on the floor. “This a homicide or what?” he asked.
“Yes,” Carella said.
“The stiff been printed already? Case we find any wild latents?”
“She’s been printed,” Carella said.
“Any signs of forcible entry?”
“None that we saw.”
“Can we skip the windowsills then?”
“Whatever you think,” Carella said.
“What the hell are we looking for, anyway?”
“Traces of anybody else who might’ve been in here.”
“That could be the whole fuckin’ city,” the first technician said, and shook his head. But they got to work nonetheless. The second technician was even whistling as he started dusting the mantelpiece for fingerprints.
An open doorframe, no door in it, led to the only bedroom in the apartment, large and airy, with a high ceiling and the same oversized windows overlooking the street. There was a bed against one wall, an unpainted dresser opposite it, an unpainted desk angled into a corner. There were Ramsey University pennants on one of the walls, together with framed photographs of Marcia Schaffer in track costume, looking healthy and radiant and bursting with life. One of the pictures showed her with her blond hair blowing on the wind behind her, arms and legs pumping, mouth open and sucking in air as she broke the tape at a finish line. A gray team jacket — with the school’s name lettered across the back of it in purple, and the word TRACK appliqued under the school’s seal on the front — was draped over the chair near the desk. There were open books on the desktop. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. Carella glanced at it. Marcia Schaffer had been working on a paper for an anthropology class. Man stands alone, he thought, because man alone stands. Marcia Schaffer would never stand again, no less run. The runner had been knocked down in her twenty-first year of life.
In the bedroom closet, they found a sparse assortment of clothing — several dresses and skirts, sweaters on hangers, a ski parka, a raincoat, blue jeans, tailored slacks, a gray warm-up suit with the university’s name and seal on it. Together, they went through coat pockets and jacket pockets, the pockets of all the jeans and slacks. Nothing. They shook out loafers and high-heeled shoes, track shoes and sneakers. Nothing. They opened a valise on the closet shelf. It was empty. They crossed the room to the dresser, and methodically went through the clothes in the drawers there. Bras and panties, slips and more sweaters, blouses and pantyhose, knee socks and sweat socks. In a corner of the top drawer, they found a dispenser for birth control pills.
They went back into the living room where the technicians were working, and went through all the desk drawers, searching in vain for an appointment calendar. They found a small leather-bound book listing names, addresses, and telephone numbers, presumably of friends and relatives. Marcia Schaffer seemed to have known quite a few people in the city, but most of them were women, and neither Carella nor Hawes believed that a woman would have had the strength to hoist Marcia’s dead-weight body up onto a lamppost some twenty-five feet above the ground. In the S section of the book, Carella found a listing for Schaffer, no surnames following it, no address, simply a telephone number with a 316 area code preceding it. He was willing to bet this was the area code for Manhattan, Kansas. He would have to call her parents. Soon. He would have to tell them their golden girl was dead.
He sighed heavily.
“Something?” Hawes asked. He was rummaging in the wastebasket alongside the desk, studying scraps of crumpled paper.
“No, no,” Carella said.
Most of the scraps in the wastebasket were handwritten notes Marcia Schaffer had made for the paper she’d been writing. There was a grocery list. There was a letter she had started and then crumpled. It began with the words, Dear Mom and Dad, I hate to ask you for money again so soon after... There was a worksheet with a list of figures she had added and then crossed out and added once again, apparently seeking a correct checkbook balance. There was a card from a place that delivered pizzas. That was all.
They went into the bathroom. Several pairs of plain white cotton panties were draped over the shower rod. An open box of super-absorbent menstrual napkins was resting on the sink below the mirror. Carella tried to remember if the Medical Examiner had mentioned anything about menstruation. He felt suddenly like an intruder. He did not want to know about anything as private and personal as Marcia Schaffer’s period. But a soiled menstrual napkin was in the wastebasket under the sink. He opened the medicine cabinet. Hawes was going through the hamper near the scale, pulling out dirty pieces of laundry, examining each article of clothing.
“Bloodstains here,” he said.
“She was menstruating,” Carella said.
“Better have the lab check them out, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Carella said.
Hawes began gathering the soiled clothing into a heap. He went out of the bathroom to ask the technicians about the dirty laundry. They told him to put it in a pillowcase. Carella looked into the medicine cabinet. He did not expect to find any controlled substances, and he didn’t. There was the usual array of nonprescription medications, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioners, nail polish, combs, brushes, adhesive bandages, Ace bandages — presumably because she’d been a runner and prone to muscle pulls and sprains — mouthwash, barrettes, bobby pins, and the like. J. D. Salinger would have made very little of Marcia Schaffer’s medicine cabinet. Carella closed the door.
A robe was hanging on a wall hook.
He took it down. The robe was a winter-weight garment, navy blue with white piping on the cuffs and around the shawl collar. The label indicated that it had been purchased at one of the city’s larger department stores. The words “100 % Wool” were fortified on the label with the universal symboclass="underline"
The label was further marked with the letter “L” for “Large.” Carella felt in the pockets. One of them was empty. The other contained an almost-full package of Marlboro cigarettes and a gold cigarette lighter. Carella dropped these into separate evidence envelopes. Hawes was just coming back into the room with a pillowcase printed with little blue flowers.
“Were there cigarettes in her handbag?” Carella asked.
“What?”
“The girl’s handbag. Do you remember cigarettes?”
“No. Why would there be cigarettes? She was on the track team.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Why? What’d you find?” Hawes asked, beginning to transfer the laundry into the pillowcase.
“A pack of Marlboros. And a Dunhill lighter.”
“Is that a man’s robe?” Hawes asked, looking up.
“Looks that way.”
“How tall was she?”
“Five-eight.”
Hawes looked at the robe again. “Couldn’t be hers, do you think?”
“It’s a large,” Carella said.
Hawes nodded. “The lab’ll want it for sure,” he said.
The technicians were still working in the living room when Carella and Hawes came back to return the cotton gloves. Over the hum of the filtered vacuum cleaner, the one Carella thought was named Joe winked at his partner and said, “Half a day today?”
“When do you think you’ll be finished?” Carella asked.