Meyer had handled the questioning of the Hoddings. Carella figured it was his turn. He knocked on the door again. Knocked long and hard this time.
'Who is it?'
A man's voice. Somewhat frightened. Four o'clock in the morning, somebody banging down his door.
'Police,' Carella said, and wondered if in that single word he had not already broken the news to Annie Flynn's parents.
'What do you want?'
'Mr Flynn?'
'Yes, what is it? Hold up your badge. Let me see your badge.'
Carella took out the small leather case containing his shield and his ID card. He held it up to the peephole in the door.
'Could you open the door, please, Mr Flynn?' he asked.
'Just a minute,' Flynn said.
The detectives waited. Sounds. A city dweller's security system coming undone. The bar of a Fox lock clattering to the floor. A chain rattling free. Oiled tumblers clicking, falling. The door opened wide.
'Yes?'
A man in his mid-forties was standing there in striped pajamas and tousled hair.
'Mr Flynn?'
'Yes?'
'Detective Carella, Eighty-Seventh Squad,' Carella said, and showed the shield and the ID card again. Blue enamel on gold. Detective/Second Grade etched into the metal. 714-5632 under that. Detective/Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella typed onto the card, and then the serial number again, and a picture of Carella when his hair was shorter. Flynn carefully studied the shield and the card. Playing for time, Carella thought. He knows this is going to be bad. It's four o'clock in the morning, his baby-sitting daughter isn't home yet, he knows this is about her. Or maybe not. Four a.m. wasn't so terribly late for New Year's Eve -which it still was for some people.
At last he looked up.
'Yes?' he said again.
And with that single word, identical to all the yesses he'd already said, Carella knew for certain that the man already knew, the man was bracing himself for the words he knew would come, using the 'Yes?' as a shield to protect himself from the horror of those words, to deflect those words, to render them harmless.
'Mr Flynn . . .'
'What is it, Harry?'
A woman appeared behind him in the small entryway. The detectives had not yet entered the apartment. They stood outside the door, the cold air of the hallway enveloping them. In that instant, the doorsill seemed to Carella a boundary between life and death, the two detectives bearing the chill news of bloody murder, the man and the woman warm from sleep awaiting whatever dread thing had come to them in the middle of the night. The woman had one hand to her mouth. A classic pose. A movie pose. 'What is it, Harry?' and the hand went up to her mouth. No lipstick on that mouth. Hair as red as her dead daughter's. Green eyes. Flynn, indeed. A Maggie or a Molly, the Flynn standing there behind her husband, long robe over long nightgown, hand to her mouth, wanting to know what it was. Carella had to tell them what it was.
'May we come in?' he asked gently.
* * * *
The squadroom at a quarter past five on New Year's morning looked much as it did on any other day of the year. Dark green metal filing cabinets against apple green walls. The paint on the walls flaking and chipping. A water leak causing a small bulge in the ceiling. Cigarette-scarred wooden desks. A water cooler in one corner of the room. A sink with a mirror over it. Duty chart hanging on the wall just inside the wooden slatted rail divider that separated the squadroom from the long corridor outside. A sense of dimness in spite of the naked hanging light bulbs. An empty detention cage. Big, white-faced clock throwing minutes into the empty hours of the night. At one of the desks, Detective/Third Grade Hal Willis was typing furiously.
'Don't bother me,' he said the moment they came into the room and before anyone had said a word to him.
Willis was the shortest man on the squad. Curly black hair. Brown eyes.
Hunched over the machine like an organ grinder's monkey, he pounded at the keys as if he'd been taught a new and satisfying trick. Battering the machine into submission. Both fists flying. The reports Willis submitted were no masterpieces, but he didn't realize that. He would have made a good lawyer; his English composition qualified him for writing contracts no one could understand.
Neither Carella nor Meyer bothered him.
They had business of their own.
They had learned little of substance from either the Hoddings or the Flynns; they would question them again later, when the shock and subsequent numbness had worn off. But they had been able to garner from them some definite times that pinpointed Annie Flynn's whereabouts and activities while she was not being murdered. Starting with all the negatives, they hoped one day they might get lucky enough to fill in the positives that would lead to the killer. Cops sometimes got lucky, Harold.
Meyer sat behind the typewriter.
Carella sat on the edge of the desk.
'Quiet, you two,' Willis called from across the room.
Neither of them had yet said a word to him.
'Eight p.m.,' Carella said. 'Annie Flynn leaves her apartment at 1124 North Sykes…'
Meyer began typing.
'. . . arrives Hodding apartment, 967 Grover Avenue, at eight-fifteen P.M.'
He waited, watching as Meyer typed.
'Okay,' Meyer said.
'Eight-thirty p.m. Hoddings leave Annie alone with the baby . . .'
Meyer kept typing.
* * * *
A cold gray dawn was breaking to the east.
He had shared bacon and eggs with Eileen in an all-night diner on Leland and Pike and then had jokingly but hopefully asked, 'Your place or mine?' to which she had given him a look that said, 'Please, Bert, not while I'm eating,' which was the sort of look she always gave him these days whenever he suggested sex.
Ever since she'd blown away that lunatic last October, Eileen had sworn off sex and decoy work. Not necessarily in that order. She had also told Kling - who, she guessed, was still her Significant Other, more or less - that she planned to leave police work as soon as she could find another job that might make use of her many-splendored talents, like for example being able to disarm rapists in the wink of an eye or put away serial killers with a single shot. Or, to be more accurate, six shots, the capacity of her service revolver, the first one in his chest, the next one in his shoulder, the third one in his back, and the others along the length of his spine as he lay already dead on the bed. I gave you a chance, she'd said over and over again, I gave you a chance, blood erupting on either side of his spine, I gave you a chance.
'Now I want a chance,' she'd told Kling.
He hoped she didn't mean it. He could not imagine her as a private ticket, tailing wayward husbands in some imitation city, of which there were many in the US of A. He could not imagine her doing square-shield work in a department store somewhere in the boonies, collaring shoplifters and pickpockets. I'm quitting the force, she'd told him. Quitting this city, too. This fucking city.
Tonight, they'd left the diner and he'd gone up to her apartment for another cup of coffee, greet the new year. Kissed her demurely on the cheek. Happy New Year, Eileen. Happy New Year, Bert. A sadness in her eyes. For what had been. For the Eileen who'd been his lover. For the Eileen who'd been a fearless cop before the city and the system burned it out of her. Ah, Jesus, he'd thought and had to turn his head away so she wouldn't see the sudden tears flooding his eyes. Still dark outside when he'd left the apartment. But as he'd driven home through silent deserted streets, a thin line of light appeared in the sky in the towers to the east.