“Let’s say we’re making a routine check, shall we?” Carella said, smiling. “Where can we reach you if we need you, Mr. Barlow?”
“I’m right here every night,” Barlow said, “from six o’clock on. During the day, you can reach me at the office.”
“Where’s that?” Meyer asked.
“Anderson and Loeb. That’s downtown, in Isola. 891 Mayfair. In the Dock Street section.”
“What sort of a firm is that, Mr. Barlow?”
“Optics,” Barlow said.
“And what do you do there?”
“I’m in the mailing room.”
“Okay,” Carella said, “thanks a lot for your time. We’ll keep you posted on any developments.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Barlow said. He rose and began limping toward the door with them. On the front step, he said, “Find him, will you?” and then closed the door.
They waited until they were in the sedan before they began talking. They were silent as they went down the front walk washed with April rain, silent as they entered the car, silent as Carella started it, turned on the wipers, and pulled the car away from the curb.
Then Meyer said, “What do you think, Steve?”
“What do you think?”
Meyer scratched his bald pate. “Well, nobody thinks it was suicide,” he said cautiously. “That’s for sure”
“Mmmm.”
“Be funny, wouldn’t it?”
“What would?”
“If this thing that everybody’s convinced is murder actually turns out to be suicide. That’d be real funny, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, hilarious.”
“You’ve got no sense of humor,” Meyer said. “That’s your trouble. I don’t mean to bring up personality defects, Steve, but you are essentially a humorless man.”
“That’s true.”
“I wouldn’t have mentioned it if it weren’t true,” Meyer said, his blue eyes twinkling. “What do you suppose make you such a serious man?”
“The people I work with, I guess.”
“Do you find them depressing?” Meyer asked, seemingly concerned.
“I find them obnoxious,” Carella confessed.
“Tell me more,” Meyer said gently. “Did you really hate your father when you were a small boy?”
“Couldn’t stand him. Still can’t,” Carella said. “You know why?”
“Why?” Meyer asked.
“Because he’s essentially a humorless man,” Carella said, and Meyer burst out laughing.
* * * *
9
In police work, “a routine check” is very often something that can hardly be considered routine. A pair of detectives will kick in the front door of an apartment, be greeted by a screaming, hysterical housewife in her underwear who wants to know what the hell they mean by breaking in like that, and they will answer, “Just a routine check, ma’am.” A patrolman will pass the stoop of a tenement building and suddenly line up the teenagers innocently standing there, force them to lean against the wall of the building with their palms flat while he frisks them, and when they complain about their rights, will answer, “Shut up, you punks. This is a routine check.” A narcotics cop will insist on examining a prostitute’s thighs for hit marks, even when he knows she couldn’t possibly be a junkie, only because he is conducting “a routine check.”
Routine checks sometimes provide excuses and alibis for anything a cop might feel like doing in the course of an investigation- or even outside the course of one. But there are bona-fide routine checks, especially where suicide or homicide is concerned, and Carella was involved in just such a check on the day he discovered Mary Tomlinson was a liar.
Carella never read mystery fiction because he found it a bore, and besides he’d been a cop for a long, long time and he knew that the Means, the Motive, and the Opportunity were three catchwords that didn’t mean a damn when a corpse was staring up at you- or sometimes down at you, as the case might be. He had investigated cases where the motive wasn’t a motive at all. A man can push his wife into the river because he thinks he wants to teach her to swim, and you can question him until you’re both blue in the face and he’ll insist he loved her since they were both in kindergarten and there is simply no Motive at all for his having murdered her. The Means of murder were always fairly obvious, and he couldn’t imagine why anyone outside of a motion-picture cop confronted with exotic and esoteric cases involving rare impossible-to-trace poisons got from pygmy tribes would be overly concerned with what killed a person: usually, you found a guy with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, and you figured what killed him was a gun. Sometimes, the cause of death was something quite other than what the surface facts seemed to indicate-a girl is found with a knife in her chest, you assume she’s been stabbed until the lab tells you someone drowned her in the bathtub first. But usually, if a man looked as if he’d been shot, he’d been shot. If a woman looked as if she’d been strangled, she’d been strangled. Means and Motive were both crocks to the working cop. Opportunity was the biggest crock of all because every manjack in the U.S. of A., Russia, Madagascar, Japan and the Tasman Sea, Sicily, Greenland, and the Isle of Wight was presented with the Opportunity for committing murder almost every waking minute of his life. The consideration of Opportunity was only valuable in protecting the innocent. A man who was climbing Fujiyama while a murder was being committed in Naples couldn’t very well have had an Opportunity for mayhem. The point was, as Carella saw it, that one million, two hundred seventy-four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other Neapolitans did have the Opportunity for pulling off a bit of homicide that day, and the guy who did the deed certainly wasn’t going to tell you he just happened to be with the dead man when it happened. The Means, the Motive, and the Opportunity, Baloney, Carella thought, but he nonetheless was calling every insurance company in the city in an attempt to find out whether or not either Tommy Barlow or Irene Thayer had carried life insurance.
He had spoken to twelve insurance companies that morning, had knocked off for lunch when his voice and his dialing finger showed signs of giving out, and had called six more companies since his return to the squad room at 1 p.m.. He was dialing his nineteenth company when Meyer said, “What are you doing there on the phone all day?”
“Insurance companies,” Carella answered.
“You’re a cop. Forget about insurance. The rates are too high.”
“It’s not for me. I’m trying to…” Carella waved Meyer aside with his hand, and said into the phone, “Hello, this is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad. I’d like some information, please.”
“What sort of information, sir?”
“Concerning policy holders.”
“I’ll connect you. Just a moment.”
“Thank you.” Carella covered the mouthpiece and said to Meyer, “I’m trying to find out if Barlow or the girl were insured.”