He swung the gun backhanded, clinging to the steps with one hand, swinging the gun without looking in a wide-armed blind swipe at whoever was behind him. The gun connected. Miraculously, he felt it colliding with flesh, and he heard someone grunt in pain, and he whirled instantly, his back to the steps, and he brought back both feet in an intuitive spring-coil action, unleashing them, the soles of his feet colliding with the man’s midriff, sending the man pitching back and down the steps; and all the while Carella was itching to pull the trigger of his gun, all the while he was dying to kill this rotten son of a bitch who was an expert at beating up cops. He got to his feet. The man had rolled to the bottom of the steps, and now he crawled to his knees and Carella leveled the .38 and said, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and he thought, Go ahead, run. Run and you’re dead.
But the man didn’t run. He sat right where he was at the bottom of the steps while the woman at the top continued screaming and the man from the change booth kept asking over and over again, “Are you all right, are you all right?”
Carella went down the steps.
He grabbed the man by the chin, holding the gun muzzle against his chest, and he lifted the man’s head and looked into his face.
He had never seen him before in his life.
* * * *
12
Carella said “No hospital!” and the ambulance driver turned to the intern riding in the back, and the intern looked at Carella and said, “But, sir, you’re bleeding rather profusely,” and Carella pinned him with his sternest minion-of-the-law stare and said, “No goddamn hospital!” and the intern had the distinct impression that if he’d insisted on this going-to-the hospital routine, he himself might be the one who went. So he shrugged in his very calm, textbook, intern way, wishing they’d be called some morning to pick up a nice timid old lady with a traumatic subdural hemorrhage instead of a bleeding wildman with a gun in his fist, but those were the breaks, and anyway he’d had all this in first year med. It was better to go to the hospital as a part of the staff, rather than as a patient. So he went.
The man at the bottom of the steps who sat there somewhat sheepishly clutching the area below his stomach, which Carella had kicked with both big feet, wasn’t saying very much. His weapon, a sawed-off broom handle, had gone down the steps with him, and Carella picked it up and then bummed a ride from the precinct patrolmen, who had been called-together with the hospital- by the helpful change booth attendant. The patrolmen dropped Carella and his prisoner at the 87th Precinct. Carella, his gun still in his hand, shoved the man across the sidewalk, and up the front steps, and past the muster desk, and up the iron-runged stairway leading to the Detective Division, and down the corridor, and through the slatted rail divider, and then pushed him into a straight-backed chair which, it seemed, was immediately surrounded by detectives.
“You’re bleeding,” Meyer said to Carella “You know that?”
“I know it,” Carella said. To the man seated in the chair with his head bent, Carella said, “What’s your name, mister?”
The man didn’t answer.
Carella took the man’s jaw between the fingers of one hand, squeezing hard and lifting the man’s head, and looking directly into his eyes.
“Your name, mister,” he repeated.
The man didn’t answer.
“Get up.”
The man didn’t move.
“Get up!” Carella shouted angrily, and he seized the man by the front of the lightweight jacket he was wearing, and then hurled him halfway across the room to the wall alongside the filing cabinets.
“Take it easy, Steve,” Meyer cautioned.
Carella holstered his gun, and went through each of the man’s pockets. He found a wallet in one of them, and he turned the man around, shoved him into a chair again, and then sat on the edge of a desk as he went through the wallet. Hawes and Meyer stood on opposite sides of the prisoner, waiting. Meyer glanced at Carella, and then shook his head.
“Miscolo!” he yelled.
“Yo!” Miscolo yelled back from the Clerical Office.
“Bring in some iodine and some Band-Aids, will you?”
“Yo!” Miscolo answered.
Carella looked up from the wallet. “Richard Bandler,” he said. He looked at the man. “That your name?”
“You’re holding my driver’s license in your hand, who the hell’s name do you think it is?”
Carella flipped the license onto the desk and walked slowly to Bandler and said very slowly and very distinctly, “Bandler, I don’t like you very much. I didn’t like you the first time you cold-cocked me, and I don’t like you any better after the second time. It’s all I can do, Bandler, to keep myself from kicking you clear through next Sunday, so you’d better watch your mouth, Bandler, you dig? You’d just better answer everything I ask you nice and peaceful or you’re going to be a cripple before they take you to jail, you understand that, Bandler?”
“It seems plain enough,” Bandler said.
“It better be plain enough,” Carella warned. “Is your name Richard Bandler?”
“That’s my name.”
“Get that tone out of your voice!” Carella shouted.
“What tone?”
“Take it easy, Steve,” Hawes said.
Carella clenched his fists, unclenched them, walked back to the desk and picked up the driver’s license again. “Is this your correct address? 413 South Sixty-fifth, Isola?”
“No. I’ve moved since.”
“Where to?”
“I’m staying at the Hotel Culbertson downtown.”
“How long have you been staying there?”
“About ten days.”
“You moved from Sixty-fifth Street ten days ago?”
“No. I moved from Sixty-fifth last month.”
“Where to?”
Bandler paused.
“Where to, Bandler?”
“The Coast.”
“When did you leave?”