“What was the number of the plate, Mr. Coluzzi?” Carella asked.
Coluzzi opened his sketch pad. He had been working in charcoal, and a delicately shaded drawing of the boats at the dock filled half of the page. In one corner of the page, in charcoal, he had written:
Carella noticed that he had crossed the seven, in the Continental manner. He nodded briefly to himself, and then copied the number into his own pad.
“Can you tell us exactly what happened, Mr. Coluzzi?” he said.
“The car pulled to the curb. Down there.” Coluzzi pointed. “I noticed it right away because it came in with a lot of noise, tires shrieking, door slamming. And then a man ran up the embankment directly to this other man who was sitting on the bench there. The other man got up right away, and tried to run, but the one who got out of the car was too fast for him. He caught his arm and swung him around, and then he brought his right hand around and at first I thought he was only punching him, do you know, with his right hand, but instead he was stabbing him. I stood up on the rock and yelled at him, and that was when he turned and looked at me, and began running down to the car again. I think he was frightened. I don’t think he would have left his knife sticking in the man that way, if he hadn’t been frightened.”
“Are you frightened, Mr. Coluzzi?”
“Me? Of what?”
“Of telling us all this? Of possible reprisal?”
“Reprisal? What’s that?”
“Vendetta,” Carella said in Italian.
“Ma che cosa?” the old man said. “Vendetta? Che importa? I’m an old man. What are they going to do with their vendetta? Kill me? If this is the worst that can happen to me, I welcome it.”
“We appreciate your help, Mr. Coluzzi.”
“The way I figure it, a man is entitled in this country to come to the park and sit on a bench if he wants to. No one has the right to murder him while he is sitting on a bench minding his own business.”
“Thanks again,” Carella said.
“Prego,” the old man answered, and went back to sketching the rowboat, on the lake.
* * * *
The old man’s eyesight was good, even though he was sixty-seven years old. A call to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles confirmed that a blue 1960 Cadillac convertible bearing the license plate IS-7146 was registered to a Mr. Frank Dumas at 1137 Fairview in, of course, Isola. The “IS” on the plate made the Isola address mandatory. Carella thanked the clerk at the bureau, turned to Hawes, and said, “Too easy. It’s too damn easy.”
Hawes shrugged and answered, “We haven’t got him yet.”
They checked out a sedan and drove downtown to Fairview Street. Carella was thinking that he had drawn Lineup the next day, and that would mean getting up an hour earlier in order to be all the way downtown on time. Hawes was thinking that he was due in court on Monday to testify in a burglary case. They drove with the windows in the car open. The car was an old Buick, fitted with a police radio and new tires. It had been a good car in its day, but Carella wondered what it would do in a chase with one of this year’s souped-up models. Fairview Street was thronged with people who had come outdoors simply to talk to each other or to catch a breath of spring Mr. They parked the car at the curb in front of 1137, and began walking toward the building. The people on the front stoop knew immediately that they were cops. The sedan was unmarked, and both Carella and Hawes were wearing business suits, and shirts and ties, but the people sitting on the front stoop of the tenement knew they were cops and would have known it even if they’d walked up those steps wearing Bermuda shorts and sneakers. A cop has a smell. If you live long enough in an area infested with cops, you get to know the smell. You get to fear it, too, because cops are one thing you can never figure. They will help you one moment and turn on you the next. The people sitting on the front stoop watched Carella and Hawes, two strangers, mount the front steps and walk into the vestibule. The stoop cleared immediately. The two young men standing there immediately decided to go to the candy store for an egg cream. The old man from the building next door decided to go up on the roof and look at his pigeons. The old lady who lived on the ground floor packed up her knitting, picked up her folding chair, and went inside to watch daytime television. Cops almost always spelled trouble, and detectives spelled the biggest kind of trouble.
Carella and Hawes, not unaware of the subtle discrimination taking place behind them, studied the mailboxes and found a listing for Mr. Frank Dumas in apartment 44. They went through the vestibule and up the steps. On the second floor, they passed a little girl who was sitting on the steps tightening her skates with a skate key.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Carella answered.
“Are you coming to my house?” she asked.
“Where’s your house?”
“A pommin twenny-one.”
“No, sorry,” Carella said, smiling.
“I thought you was the insurance,” the little girl said, and went back to tightening her skates.
On the fourth-floor landing, they drew their guns. Apartment 44 was in the middle of the hall. They walked silently to the door, listened outside for a moment, and then flanked it. Carella nodded at Hawes who braced himself for a flat-footed kick at the lock.
He was bringing back his knee when the shots came from within the apartment, shockingly loud, splintering the door.
* * * *
15
Hawes dropped at the sound of the first shot, just as the splintered hole appeared in the wooden door. The slug whistled past his head as he fell flat to the floor, and then ricocheted off the wall behind him and went caroming at a crazy angle down the hallway just as the second shot erupted. The wood splintered again., and Carella winced as the slug tore its way across the narrow corridor, inches from his face where he stood to the left of the door, his gun pulled in tight against his chest, his head pulled down into his shoulders. On the floor, Hawes was scrambling away to the right of the door as the third shot came. The next four shots followed almost immediately, ripping wood from the door, ricocheting, into the cracked ceiling overhead. He had counted seven shots, an empty automatic if the person inside was firing a certain type of .45. There was a pause. The man could be reloading. Or he could be firing another type of .45 with a magazine capacity of nine cartridges, or a Harrington & Richardson .22 with the same capacity, or… there was no time to run through a gun catalogue. He could be reloading, or simply waiting, or even carrying two guns-or he could at this moment be climbing out the window. Carella took a deep breath. He backed off across the hallway, braced himself against the opposite wall, and unleashed the sole of his foot at the lock on the door.
The door sprang inward, and Carella followed it into a hail of bullets that came from the window. Hawes was immediately behind him. They both dropped flat to the worn linoleum inside the apartment, firing at the window where the figure of a man appeared in silhouette for just a moment, and then vanished. They got to their feet, and rushed across the room. Carella put his head outside the window, and then pulled it back at once as a shot sounded somewhere above him, and a piece of red brick spattered against his cheek.