“Dump it,” Meyer said.
“Bert?”
“Dump it.”
“Steve?”
Carella paused for a long time. Then he nodded reluctantly and said, “Dump it. Dump it.”
The request was placed on Lieutenant Peter Byrnes’ desk that afternoon. He glanced at it cursorily, picked up his pen, and then signed it, granting his permission. Before he went home that night, Alf Miscolo, filing a sheaf of papers he’d picked up from all the desks in the squadroom, went to the green cabinet marked OPEN FILE, slid out the drawer and dropped into it a manila folder containing all the papers on the Tommy Barlow-Irene Thayer case.
For all intents and purposes, the case was closed.
* * * *
14
The man was lying on his back in Grover Park.
They had already traced the outline of his body on the moist grass by the time Carella and Hawes arrived, and the man seemed ludicrously framed by his own ridiculous posture, the white powder capturing the position of death and freezing it. The police photographer was performing his macabre dance around the corpse, choreographing himself into new angles each time his flash bulb popped. The corpse stared up at him unblinkingly, twisted into the foolish grotesquery of death, one leg bent impossibly beneath him, the other stretched out straight. The sun was shining. It was May, and there was the heady aroma of newly mown grass in the park, the delicious fragrance of magnolia and cornelian cherry and quince. The man had a knife in his heart.
They stood around the body exchanging the amenities, men who were called together only when Death gave a party. The lab boys, the photographer, the assistant medical examiner, the two detectives from Homicide North, the two men from the 87th, they all stood around the man with the knife sticking out of his chest, and they asked each other how they were, and had they heard about Manulus over in the 33rd, got shot by a burglar night before last, what about this moon-lighting stuff, did they think the commissioner would stick to his guns, it was a nice day, wasn’t it, beautiful weather they’d been having this spring, hardly a drop of rain. They cracked a few jokes-the photographer had one about the first astronaut to reach the moon-and they went about their work with a faintly detached air of busyness. That was a dead man lying in the grass there. They accepted his presence only by performing a mental sleight of hand that in effect denied his humanity. He was no longer a man, he was simply a problem.
Carella pulled the knife from the dead man’s chest as soon as the assistant m.e. and the photographer were through with the stiff, carefully lifting the knife with his handkerchief tented over his hand, so as not to smear any latent prints that might be on the handle or blade.
“You going to make out the tag?” one of the laboratory boys asked him.
“Yeah,” Carella answered curtly.
He pulled three or four evidence tags from his back pocket, slid one loose from the rubber-banded stack, returned the others to his pocket, took the cap from his fountain pen, and began writing:
Automatically, he turned over the tag and filled in the information requested on the reverse side:
He looped the strings of the tag over the handle of the knife, fastening the two together where blade joined handle. Then, carrying the knife by the tag, he went over to where the laboratory technician was making a sketch of the body and its location.
“Might as well take this with you,” Carella said.
“Thanks,” the technician said. He accepted the knife and carried it over to his car which was parked partly on the grass, partly on the road that wound through the park. An ambulance had already arrived, and the attendants were waiting for everyone to finish with the body so they could cart it off to the morgue for autopsy. Hawes, standing some ten feet from where the attendants waited, was questioning a man who claimed he had seen the entire thing. Carella walked over aimlessly. He sometimes felt that all the official rigmarole following the discovery of a corpse was designed to allow a painless adjustment to the very idea of death by violence. The men took their pictures and made their sketches and collected their latent prints and whatever evidence was available, but these were only the motions of men who were stalling while they got used to the notion of dealing with a corpse.
“What time was this?” Hawes was asking the man.
“It must have been about a half-hour ago,” the man said. He was a thin old man with rheumy blue eyes and a running nose. He kept wiping his nose with the back of his hand, which was crusted with mucus.
“Where were you sitting, Mr. Coluzzi?” Hawes asked.
“Right there on that high rock. I was making a drawing of the lake. I come here every morning, and I sketch a little. I’m retired, you see. I live with my daughter and my son-in-law on Grover Avenue, just across from the park.”
“Can you tell us what happened, Mr. Coluzzi?” Hawes said. He noticed Carella standing beside him and said, “Steve, this is Mr. Dominick Coluzzi. He was an eyewitness to the killing. Mr. Coluzzi, this is Detective Carella.”
“How do you do?” Coluzzi said, and then immediately asked, “Let è Italiano, no?”
“Yes,” Carella answered.
“Va bene,” Coluzzi said, smiling. “Ho dicevo a questo suo amico …”
“I don’t think he understands Italian,” Carella said gently. “Do you, Cotton?”
“No,” Hawes answered.
“Mi scusi,” Coluzzi said. “I was telling him that I come here every morning to sketch. And I was sitting up there when the car pulled up.”
“What kind of a car was it, Mr. Coluzzi?” Carella asked.
“A Cadillac convertible,” Coluzzi said without hesitation.
“The color?”
“Blue.”
“Top up or down?”
“Up.”
“You didn’t happen to notice the license plate number, did you?”
“I did,” Coluzzi said, and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I wrote it down on my pad.”
“You’re a very observant person, Mr. Coluzzi,” Hawes said, his brows raised in admiration.
Coluzzi shrugged and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “It isn’t every day you see a man get stabbed to death,” he said. He was plainly enjoying himself. He was perhaps sixty-seven, sixty-eight, a thin old man whose arms were still muscular and wiry, but whose hands trembled slightly, a thin old man who had been let out to pasture, who came to the park each morning to sketch. This morning which had started out the way all other mornings did for him, something new had come into his life. He had been watching the lake and sketching the section near the dock where the row-boats bobbed in imperfect unison when suddenly a Cadillac had pulled to the side of the winding road, and suddenly murder had been done. And the old man, unnoticed on his high boulder overlooking the lake and the scene of the murder, alert, quick, and watched, and then shouted at the killer, and then had written down the number of the car’s license plate as it drove away. For the first time in a long time, the old man was useful again, and he enjoyed his usefulness, enjoyed talking to these two men who admired his quick thinking, who spoke to him as if they were speaking to an equal, as if they were speaking to another man, and not to some child who had to be let out into the sunshine each morning.