“The Poison Tree is about a cop who failed to follow legal guidelines before searching for an ice pick in a sewer. The cop searched around in the sewer muck, and he found this bloody ice pick, and a good suspect’s fingerprints were all over it, but the cop’s information about that ice pick had been obtained illegally, Ollie, and the DA told him it was the fruit of the poison tree, and the case got kicked out of court, and the murderer is probably using that same ice pick on a hundred other people right this minute. The Poison Tree Doctrine, Ollie. How long have you been a cop, Ollie?”
“Ah, yes, the Poison Tree Doctrine,” Ollie said, still being W. C. Fields.
“We are in here without a warrant,” Carella said, “we have broken down a citizen’s door, and we are in here illegally. Which means that any evidence we find in here...”
“I see your point, m’boy,” Ollie said. “Would it disturb you overly, however, if I snooped around a bit? Without touching anything?”
“Ollie...”
“Because that’s what I’m gonna do,” Ollie said in his own voice, “even if it disturbs the shit out of you. We’re here to see if this guy has any connection with the murders. If he does...”
“We’re here to find out if this guy parked his car...”
“We already know that! That ain’t why we’re here, Steve.”
“We’re here to talk to the man!”
“Well, the man ain’t here, is he? Do you see the man here? So who do we talk to? The four walls?”
“We talk to a magistrate about getting a search warrant. That’s the proper...”
“No, we talk to the man’s appointment calendar to see where he is tonight, and then we go find the man, and we talk to him personally.”
“And when a judge...”
“A judge ain’t gonna know we talked to the man’s appointment calendar, is he? I already told you, Steve, when we got here we walked in on a 10–21, and that’s what I’m gonna call in before we walk out of here. In the meantime, I’m gonna look through the man’s desk and see if he kept an appointment calendar.”
Carella watched as Ollie walked to the desk across the room and opened the top drawer.
“See?” Ollie said. “Easy. The man is making it easy for us.”
He turned from the desk, and showed Carella an appointment calendar.
Now what we do,” Ollie said, “is open the calendar to October... like this.”
He opened the calendar.
“And we look for October twentieth, which is today’s date... well, well, take a look at this, Steve. This is a very talkative calendar, the man has here.”
Carella looked.
For October sixth, the night Marcia Schaffer was killed, Lytell had written her name into his calendar, and beneath that the name of her school, Ramsey University. For October thirteenth, he had written in “Nancy Annunziato” and then “Marino’s.” For last night, he had put down Darcy Welles’s name and “Marino’s” again.
“You seeing all this?” Ollie asked.
“I’m seeing it.”
“You see what he’s got written down for tonight?”
For tonight, Lytell had written the name “Luella Scott” and—
“Six to five, she’s a nigger,” Ollie said.
— and the word “Folger” which could only stand for Folger University, up in Riverhead.
Ollie closed the appointment calendar.
“Should take us half an hour to get there, twenty minutes if we hit the hammer,” he said. “Let me call in this burglary we discovered, and then let’s get the fuck out of here — before he breaks her neck, too.”
It was always Arthur Brown’s luck to catch Diamondback.
Anytime he had to go anyplace outside the precinct, he seemed to catch Diamondback. He figured it was departmental policy. Send all your black cops up to black Diamondback whenever they had to leave the confines of the Eight-Seven.
It was difficult for a black cop up here in Diamondback. A lot of the black people up here, they weren’t exactly on the side of law and order, and when they saw a black cop coming around they figured he was a traitor to the cause. Brown didn’t know what cause. He guessed that all the honest cab drivers, clergymen, salesclerks, letter carriers, stenographers, secretaries and other hardworking people up here also wondered what cause the pimps, pushers, prostitutes, numbers runners, burglars, armed robbers, and petty thieves felt a cop like Arthur Brown was betraying. The only cause he respected was the one that told you to be the best possible person you could be in a world gone rotten. Diamondback was the world as rotten as it could ever get. He wouldn’t live up here in Diamondback even if he was some guy cleaning out toilets for a living — which was what he sometimes felt he actually did for a living.
He had noticed over the years that not too many black lawyers, doctors, engineers, or architects lived up here in Diamondback — not in this part of Diamondback, anyway. If any black who’d made it decided to live in Diamondback at all, it was in the fringe area known as Sweetloaf. If Arthur Brown had to live in Diamondback, he guessed he would want to live in Sweetloaf. The only trouble with Sweetloaf was that the population there was entirely black. Brown felt there was something very wrong about the population of anyplace being entirely anything. Except maybe the population of China. But even that troubled him a little. How did those people over there in China manage to get through a day without seeing anybody who had blond hair and blue eyes? Didn’t it get boring just seeing everybody walking around with black hair and brown eyes? Brown was glad he didn’t live in China. He was also glad he didn’t live in Diamondback. But here he was again, ten minutes to 11:00 and smack in the heart of Diamondback, talking to a man who owned a Cadillac Seville with the license plate WU3200.
Both he and Hawes had known the minute the MVB came back with an address in Diamondback that this probably wasn’t their man. The waiter at Marino’s had described the guy with Darcy Welles as white. There were some white people living up here, Brown guessed, but they were few and far between. So the odds were at least a hundred to one that the guy who answered the door for them would be black (which he was) and the odds on a black man up here driving a brand new Cadillac Seville were at least a thousand to one that he was either dealing dope or hustling broads.
Willy Bartlett was hustling broads.
They spent exactly five minutes with him while he told them he was downtown last night dropping off a “girlfriend” of his, and they knew they were wasting even those five minutes because he was the wrong color to begin with.
Then again, Brown thought, maybe every black man in this city is the wrong color to begin with.
Eileen Burke couldn’t sleep.
It was eleven o’clock, and she had already set Mary’s alarm for 9:00 a.m., which meant that if she could manage to get to sleep without thinking of all sorts of things, she would get ten hours sleep before the alarm went off. That was a lot of sleep. Whenever she was in Bert’s bed, or vice versa, she averaged six hours a night — if she was lucky. Tonight, she was in Mary’s bed, and she couldn’t sleep, and she guessed it was because she had so many things to think about. One of those things was Bert out there knocking on a door that maybe had a killer behind it. Another thing was the possibility that the rapist would come knocking on her door — Mary’s door — tomorrow night sometime. Neither of the thoughts were conducive to sleep.