* * * *
10
“Who said they took sleeping pills?” Detective-Lieutenant Sam Grossman wanted to know.
“You said they might have,” Carella answered. “You said suicides of this type sometimes took sleeping pills, anything to make the death nice and pleasant. Isn’t that what you said?”
“All right, all right, it’s what I said,” Grossman answered impatiently, “but did I ask you to send me fourteen cockamamie bottles of sleeping pills?”
“No, but…”
“Steve, I’m up to my ears in work here, and you send me all these sleeping pills. What am I supposed to do with them?”
“I just wanted to know if…”
“What’d the necropsy report say. Steve? Did it say anything about sleeping pills?”
“No, but I thought…”
“Then what are we supposed to do with these fourteen bottles of pills, would you mind telling me? What do you want me to say about them? Can they put you to sleep? Yes, they can put you to sleep. Would an overdose of any or all of them kill you? Yes, some of them could be fatal if taken in quantity. Okay? Now, what else?”
“I don’t know what else,” Carella said sheepishly.
“You mean you’re reaching for straws already, and the case is barely a week old?”
“All right, I’m reaching for straws. Listen, Sam, you were the one who planted the homicide bug in my head, don’t you forget it.”
“Who planted? You mean you thought it was suicide?”
“I don’t know what I thought, but why not? Why can’t it be suicide?”
“Don’t get sore with me, Steve-oh.”
“I’m not sore.”
“What do you want, magic? Okay! Abba-ca-dabbra, whimmity-wham! I see… just a moment, the crystal ball is clearing…”
“Go to hell, Sam.”
“I’ve got nothing to compare any of these damn pills against!” Grossman shouted. “Who the hell’s going to bother looking for nonvolatile poisons when they’ve got an obvious case of carbon monoxide poisoning? You know how many stiffs are waiting for autopsy at the morgue? Ahhh, please.”
“Somebody should have bothered,” Carella shouted.
“That’s not my department!” Grossman shouted back. “And you happen to be wrong! Nobody should have bothered because it would have taken weeks, for Christ’s sake, and what would you have got, anyway? So what if they were drugged?”
“That could indicate homicide!”
“It could indicate balls! It could indicate they went to the drugstore and bought some pills and took them that’s what it could indicate. Don’t get me sore, Steve.”
“Don’t get me sore!” Carella shouted. “Somebody goofed at the hospital, and you know it!”
“Nobody goofed, and anyway get off my back! Call the goddamn hospital! You want to fight, call them. Did you call me up to fight?”
“I called you up because I sent you fourteen bottles of sleeping pills, and I thought you could help me with them. Obviously, you can’t help me, so I’ll just say good-bye and let you go back to sleep.”
“Look, Steve…”
“Look, Sam…”
“Ahhh, the hell with it. The hell with it. There’s no talking to a bull. I’ll never learn. Miracles. You all want miracles. The hell with it.”
Both men fell silent.
At last, Grossman asked, “What do you want me to do with these bottles?”
“You know what you can do with them,” Carella said.
There was another pause, and then Grossman began laughing. Carella, on the other end of the wire, couldn’t suppress his own grin.
“Take my advice,” Grossman said, “forget about calling the hospital. They did their job, Steve.”
Carella sighed.
“Steve?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Forget the pills you sent me, too. They’re almost all brand names, anyway. Some of them, you don’t even need a prescription. Even if the morgue had done those tests and come up with something, you’d be dealing with a pill anybody in the city could have got hold of. Forget it. Take my advice, forget it.”
“All right,” Carella said. “I’m sorry I blew my stack.”
“This is a tough one, huh?”
“Very.” Carella paused. “I’m about to hand in my jock.”
“You’ll settle for suicide?”
“I’ll settle for disorderly conduct.”
“Not you,” Grossman said simply.
“Not me,” Carella answered. “Thickheaded. My mother used to call me a thickheaded wop.” He paused. “Come on, Sam, help me with those pills. Give me an answer.”
“Steve-oh, I don’t have any.”
“We’re even,” Carella said. He sighed. “You think it was homicide? You still think so?”
Grossman paused for a long time. Then he said, “Who knows? Throw it in the Open File. Come back to it in a few months, in a year.”
“Would you throw it in the Open File?” Carella asked.
“Me? I’m thick-headed,” Grossman said. “My mother used to call me a thick-headed kike.” He paused again. “Yes, I still think it’s a homicide.”
“So do I,” Carella said.
* * * *
By the time he left the squadroom at five forty-five that night, he had called every remaining insurance company on his list in an attempt to find out whether Tommy Barlow had been insured. He had drawn a negative response from each company. As he walked to his car parked across the street from the precinct (the sun visor down, the hand-lettered placard clipped to the visor and announcing that this particular decrepit automobile belonged to a cop; please, officer on the beat, do not tag it), he wondered if Tommy Barlow had been insured by a company outside the city. And then he wondered again whether they simply weren’t chasing a suicide right into the ground.
He started the car and began driving home toward Riverhead, reviewing the facts of the case as he drove, driving very slowly and with the windows open because this was April and sometimes-especially in April-Carella felt like seventeen. Jesus, he thought, to die in April. I wonder what the figures on suicide are for April.
Let’s examine this thing, he thought. Let’s take it from the top for what it obviously is- a suicide. Let’s forget there’s any such thing as homicide. For the moment, let’s simply consider two people who are about to take their own lives, okay? Let’s piece it together that way, because none of the other ways seem to fit.
The first thing they had to do was decide they were going to kill themselves, which would seem like an odd thing to decide since they’d already made plans for…
No, no, wait a minute, he warned himself. Try to find the good reasons for suicide, okay? Try to find the things that spell suicide for Tommy Barlow and Irene Thayer, and not what stinks in this case because the things that stink are already there and suffocating me. Jesus, I wish I could take a deep breath. I wish that poor little girl hadn’t jumped, I wish to God I could change it, I wish I could reach out and hold her in my arms and say, Honey, please don’t jump, honey, please don’t throw it all away.