He went back to the squadroom with a weary ache inside him. He barely said hello to Carella who was at his own desk typing up a report. Both men left the squadroom at eight-fifteen that night, two-and-a-half hours after they were officially relieved. Carella was in a rotten mood. He ate a cold supper, snapped viciously at his wife, didn’t even go in to peek at the sleeping twins, and went straight to bed where he tossed restlessly all night long. Hawes called Christine Maxwell, a girl he had known for a long time, and asked her to go to a movie with him. He watched the screen with interesting annoyance because something was bugging him about that apparent suicide and he couldn’t quite figure out what.
* * * *
3
Dead people do not sweat.
It was very warm in the morgue, and a light sheen of perspiration covered the faces of Carella and Hawes, clung to the upper lip of the man with them, stained the armpits of the attendant who looked at the three men bleakly for a moment and then pulled out the drawer.
The drawer moved almost soundlessly on its rollers. The girl Irene lay naked and dead on the slab; they had found her in her panties, but these had been shipped immediately to the lab, and she lay naked and cool and unsweating while the attendant and the three men looked down at her. In a little while, she would be shipped to another part of the hospital, where an autopsy would be performed. For now, her body was intact. All it lacked was life.
“Is that her?” Carella asked.
The man standing between the two detectives nodded. He was a tall, thin man with pale blue eyes and blond hMr. He wore a gray gabardine suit, and a white button-down shirt with a striped tie. He did not say anything. He simply nodded, and even the nod was a brief one, as if motion were an extravagance.
“And she’s your wife, sir?” Hawes asked.
The man nodded again.
“Could you give us her full name, sir?”
“Irene,” the man said.
“Middle name?”
“That is her middle name.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her name is Margaret Irene Thayer.” The man paused. “She didn’t like the name Margaret, so she used her middle name.”
“She called herself Irene, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“And your address, Mr. Thayer?”
“1134 Bailey Avenue.”
“You were living there with your wife?”
“Yes.”
Carella and Hawes glanced at each other. Homicide at its best stinks to high heaven because everyone walking this earth has a closet he’d prefer leaving closed and homicide rarely knocks before entering. The girl Margaret Irene Thayer had been found on a bed wearing only her panties, and she’d been lying alongside a man in his undershorts. The man who had just positively identified her was named Michael Thayer, and he was her husband, and one of those little closets had just been opened, and everyone was staring into it. Carella cleared his throat.
“Were… er… you and your wife separated, or… ?
“No,” Thayer said.
“I see,” Carella answered. He paused again. “You know, Mr. Thayer, that… that your wife was found with a man.”
“Yes. Their pictures were in the paper. That’s why I called the police. I mean, when I saw Irene’s picture in the paper. I figured it was some kind of mistake. Because I thought… you see, she’d told me she was going out to visit her mother and I never suspected… so you see, I thought it was a mistake. She was supposed to be spending the night at her mother’s, you see. So I called her mother, and her mother said no, Irene hadn’t been there, and then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. So I called the police and asked if I could… could see… could see the body of the girl they’d… found.”
“And this is your wife, Mr. Thayer? You have no doubts about that?”
“She… she’s my wife,” Thayer said.
“Mr. Thayer, you said you saw pictures of both your wife and the man in the newspa…”
“Yes.”
“Did you happen to recognize the man?”
“No.” Thayer paused. “Is… is he here, too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to see him.”
“If you didn’t recognize him, there’s no need to…”
“I want to see him,” Thayer repeated.
Carella shrugged and then nodded at the attendant. They followed him across the long, high-ceilinged room. Their footsteps echoed across the tiled floor. The attendant consulted a typewritten list on a clipboard, moved down the aisle, stooped, and pulled open a second drawer. Thayer stared down into the face of the man they’d found with his wife.
“He’s dead,” he said, but the words did not seem intended for anyone.
“Yes,” Carella said.
Thayer nodded. He nodded again. “I want in keep looking at him. That’s strange, isn’t it? I want to find out what was so… different about him.”
“You still don’t recognize him?” Hawes asked.
“No. Who is he?”
“We don’t know. There was no driver’s license or other identification in his wallet. But one of the names on the suicide note was Tommy. Did your wife ever mention anyone named Tommy?”
“No.”
“And you’ve never seen him before?”
“Never.” Thayer paused. “There’s something I don’t understand. The apartment. Where… where you found them. Wasn’t… couldn’t you ask the landlady? Wouldn’t she know his name?”
“She might. But that wasn’t Tommy’s apartment.”
“What do you mean?”
“The landlady told us that apartment was rented by a man named Fred Hassler.”
“Well, perhaps he was using another name,” Thayer suggested.
Carella shook his head. “No. We brought the landlady down here for a look. This isn’t Fred Hassler.” He nodded to the attendant, and the attendant shoved the drawer back into place. “We’re trying to locate Hassler now, but so far we haven’t had any luck.” Carella paused. He wiped his forehead and then said, “Mr. Thayer, if it’s all right with you, we’d like to get out of here. There are some questions we have to ask you, but we’d prefer doing it over a cup of coffee, if that’s all right with you.”
“Yes, of course,” Thayer said.
“You need me any more?” the attendant asked.
“No. Thanks a lot, Charlie.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said, and went back to reading Playboy.
* * * *
They found a diner three blocks from the hospital, and they sat in a seat near the window and watched the girls going by outside in their thin spring cottons. Carella and Thayer ordered coffee. Hawes was a tea drinker. They sat sipping from hot mugs and listening to the whir of the overhead fans. It was spring, and the pretty girls were passing by outside, and no one wanted to discuss treachery and sudden death. But there had been sudden death, and the wife of Michael Thayer had been revealed by death in a compromising and apparently treacherous attitude, and so the questions had to be asked.