“Don’t you think Furillo sounds like Carella?”
“No,” Carella said.
“Don’t you think Charlie Weeks sounds like Ollie Weeks?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“No. Charlie Weeks sounds like Charlie Weeks.”
“To me, they sound almost like the same name.”
“The way Howard Hunter sounds like Evan Hunter.”
“That ain’t the same at all.”
“Or the way Arthur Hitler sounds like Adolf Hitler.”
“Now you’re making a joke of it,” Ollie said. “Anyway, I’ll bet there ain’t a single person in the whole world named Hitler nowadays. Not even in Germany is there a kraut named Hitler. Everybody named Hitler already changed his name to something else.”
“So why don’t you change your name to something else? If Charlie Weeks is bothering you, change your name to Ollie Jones or something.”
“Why don’t Charlie Weeks change his name to something else?” Ollie said. “Why don’t Furillo change his name to something else?”
“I don’t see any connection between Furillo and Carella,” Carella said.
“Why you so irritated tonight?”
“I’m not irritated, I’m cold.”
“We’re about to make a collar, and the man is irritated.”
“You don’t know we’re about to make a collar,” Carella said.
“I feel it in my bones,” Ollie said. “Here we are.”
He double-parked alongside a station wagon parked at the curb in front of Henry Lytell’s building. The building was a six-story brick, no doorman. They went into the small entrance alcove and checked out the mailboxes.
“Lytell, H.,” Ollie said. “Apartment 6B. Top floor. I hope there’s an elevator. Don’t that name sound familiar to you? Lytell?”
“No,” Carella said. It was as cold in the entrance alcove as it had been in the car, the kind of damp, penetrating cold that surely promised rain.
Ollie rang the bell button in the panel set alongside the mailboxes. He kept leaning on the button. There was no answering buzz on the inner door.
“You suppose there’s a super in this dump?” he asked, checking the bell-button panel. “No such luck,” he said, and pressed the button opposite the name Nakura, for apartment 5A. An answering buzz sounded at the inner door. Ollie grabbed for the knob and pushed the door open.
“Thank God for small favors,” he said, walking toward the small elevator at the back of the hall. He pressed the call button. The detectives waited. “These old buildings,” Ollie said, “the elevators’re as slow as a nigger in August.”
“I have some advice for you,” Carella said.
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Don’t ever get yourself partnered with Arthur Brown.”
“Why? Oh, you mean what I just said? That was a figure of speech.”
“Brown might not think so.”
“Sure, he would,” Ollie said, “he’s got a good sense of humor, Brown. What’s wrong with what I just said, anyway? It’s a figure of speech.”
“I don’t like your figures of speech,” Carella said.
“Come on, come on,” Ollie said, and patted him on the back. “Don’t be so irritated tonight, Steve-a-rino. We’re about to make a collar.”
“And please don’t call me Steve-a-rino.”
“What should I call you? Furillo? You want me to call you Furillo?”
“My name is Steve.”
“Furillo’s name is Frank. The sergeant there, he calls him ‘Francis’ all the time. Maybe I’ll call you Stephen. Would you like me to call you ‘Stephen,’ Stephen?”
“I would like to you call me Steve.”
“Okay, Steve. You like ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Steve?”
“I don’t like cop shows,” Carella said.
“Where the fuck’s the elevator?” Ollie said.
“You want to walk up?”
“Six flights? No way.”
The elevator finally got there. The men entered. Ollie pressed the button for the sixth floor. The doors closed.
“Speed this thing makes, we’ll be up there next Tuesday,” Ollie said.
On the sixth floor, they found apartment 6B on the wall opposite the elevator, two doors down.
“Better flank it,” Ollie said. “Lytell may be the one likes to break necks.”
His pistol was already in his right hand.
They flanked the door, Carella on the left, Ollie on the right. Ollie pressed the doorbell button. They heard chimes sounding inside. Nothing else. Ollie pressed the button again. More chimes. He put his ear to the wood, listening. Nothing.
“Quiet as a graveyard,” he said. “Back away, Steve.”
“What for?”
“I’m gonna kick it in.”
“You can’t do that, Ollie.”
“Who says?” Ollie said, and raised his right knee.
“Ollie...”
Ollie’s leg pistoned out in a flat-footed kick at the lock. The lock sprang, the door flew inward. The apartment beyond was dark.
“Anybody home?” Ollie said, and moved into the apartment in a policeman’s crouch, fanning the air ahead of him with his pistol. “Get the light,” he said to Carella.
Carella felt for a light switch on the wall inside the door. He found it, and snapped it upward.
“Police!” Ollie shouted, apparently to no one. “Cover me,” he said to Carella and moved deeper in the apartment. Carella kept his pistol leveled on the area in front of Ollie. What the hell am I doing? he thought. This is illegal. Ollie snapped on the living room light. The room was empty. On one wall there was an oversized oil painting of a male runner in jersey and shorts, the number ten on the front of the jersey, the man taking long strides, legs reaching, arms pumping. It looked like a knockoff of the paintings that guy did for Playboy magazine, Carella couldn’t remember his name. There were doors on either side of the living room, both of them closed. Without a word, the detectives fanned out, Ollie taking the door on the right, Carella the one on the left. Both rooms were bedrooms and nobody was in either of them.
“Let’s toss the joint,” Ollie said.
“No,” Carella said.
“Why not?”
“We shouldn’t even be in here,” he said, and thought at once of the patient who asked his psychiatrist to give him a farewell kiss on his final visit to the office. The psychiatrist said, “Kiss you? I shouldn’t even be lying here on the couch with you.”
“But we are in here,” Ollie said. “You can see we’re in here, can’t you?”
“Illegally,” Carella said.
“Steve, Steve,” Ollie said paternally, shaking his head. “Let me tell you a little fairy tale, do you like fairy tales, Steve?”
“Ollie, do you know you’re fooling around with the Poi...”
“Listen to my fairy tale, okay?” Ollie said. “Two honest, hardworking cops go out one night to check on a possible suspect. They get to the suspect’s apartment — which happens to be this very apartment we are now standing in — and guess what they find? They find that some burglar has already broken into the place and made a fuckin’ shambles of it. Like the good, honest, hardworking cops they are, they report the burglary to the local precinct — whatever the fuck precinct this is — and then they go on their merry way. How does that sound to you, Steve? Or don’t you like fairy tales?”
“I love fairy tales,” Carella said. “Here’s one for you, okay? It’s called the Poison Tree, and it...”
“Ah, yes, m’boy, the Poison Tree,” Ollie said, falling into his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation. “The Poison Tree, yes, yes, sounds vaguely familiar.”