Carella nodded.
'I learned my lesson up at Castleview, I been clean since.'
Meyer nodded, too.
'I play saxophone in a band called Larry Foster's Rhythm Kings,' Sammy said. 'We play for these sixty-year-old farts who were kids back in the Forties. They're very good dancers, those old farts. All the old Glenn Miller stuff, Harry James, Charlie Spivak, Claude Thornhill. We have all the arrangements. We get a lot of jobs, you'd be surprised. I learned how to play the sax in stir.'
'You must be pretty good at it,' Meyer said. 'To earn your living at it.'
'Which, if that's supposed to be sarcastic, happens to be true. I do earn my living playing saxophone.'
'Just what I said,' Meyer said.
'But what you meant is I'm still doing burglaries on the side. Which ain't true.'
'Did I say that?' Meyer asked. He turned to Carella. 'Steve, did I say that?'
'I didn't hear you say that,' Carella said. 'We're looking for Martin Proctor. Do you know where he is?'
'Is he a musician?' Sammy asked. 'What does he play?'
'The E-flat jimmy,' Meyer said.
'He's a burglar,' Carella said. 'Like you.'
'Me, I'm a saxophone player. What Proctor is, I don't know, because I don't know the man.'
'But your girlfriend knows him, doesn't she?'
'What girlfriend?'
'Your girlfriend who's a hooker and who was asking a detective we know why the police were snooping around Proctor's old address.'
'Gee, this is news to me. I'll tell you the truth, I wish my girlfriend was a hooker. Teach me a few tricks, huh?' Sammy said, and laughed. Nervously.
'Proctor did a job on New Year's Eve,' Carella said, 'in a building on Grover. Two murders were also done in that same building, the same night.'
Sammy let out a long, low whistle.
'Yeah,' Carella said.
'So where is he?' Meyer asked.
'If I don't know the man, how can I tell you where he is?'
'We're going to bust your girlfriend,' Carella said.
'What for?'
'For prostitution. We're going to get her name from this detective we know, and we're going to haul her ass off the street and ask her about Martin Proctor. And we'll keep busting her until . . .'
'Oh, you mean Martin Proctor. I thought you said Marvin Proctor.'
'Where?' Meyer said.
* * * *
Hamilton followed Kling from the station house on Grover Avenue to the subway station three blocks away, and then boarded the downtown train with him. Stood right at the man's elbow. Bertram A. Kling. Detective/ Third Grade. Isaac had got the information from the court records. Isaac was very good at gathering information. He was, however, somewhat dim when it came to comprehending the complexities of high-level business arrangements. Which was why Hamilton had not told him about the telephone call last month from Carlos Ortega in Miami. Or the necessity of employing a fool like José Herrera, who had turned out to be a fucking crook as well. Isaac would not have understood. But, giving the devil his due, he had done well on the cop. Bertram A. Kling. Who had testified at the arraignments of Herbert Trent, James Marshall, and Andrew Fields. Bertram A. Kling. Who did not know that the man standing next to him hanging on a subway strap was Lewis Randolph Hamilton, who would kill him the moment he could do it conveniently and vanish like smoke.
There were perhaps forty blacks on the subway car.
This was good for Hamilton.
Even if there were recent pictures of him in this city's police files -which he knew there were not - but even if there were, a while cop like Kling wouldn't have recognized him, anyway. Kling - with his blond hair and his peachfuzz appearance - looked like the kind of white cop who thought all black criminals looked alike. Only thing that was different on the mug shots was the numbers. Otherwise, they all looked like gorillas. He had heard too many white cops say this. Actually, it would give him great pleasure to kill Kling.
He liked killing people.
Blowing them away with the big mother Magnum.
He particularly liked killing cops.
He had killed two cops in LA. They were still looking for him out there. Black man with a beard. Gorilla with a beard. He didn't have a beard, anymore, he'd shaved in Houston before the posse took that big shipment coming up via Mexico. Wore his hair Rastafarian down there in Houston.
Hamilton hated cops.
Not even knowing Kling, he hated him. And would have enjoyed killing him even if Herrera hadn't told him a goddamn thing. Which was possible, after all, because how could Herrera have learned anything about the Tsu shipment coming up next Monday? When not even Isaac knew as yet.
Hamilton stood by Kling's side on the subway, a black man invisible among other black men, and smiled when he wondered how many people on this train even imagined that he and the big blond man were both wearing guns.
* * * *
Kling got off the train at Brogan Square, and came up out of the tunnel into a day that was still cold but beginning to turn a bit sunny. He had tailed Karin Lefkowitz first, to make an appointment with her, and now he hurried along High Street to her office in what used to be the Headquarters Building. Linked to the Criminal Courts Building by a third-floor passageway through which prisoners going to court could be moved, the old gray building looked like a Siamese twin to the one beside it. He came up the low flat steps out front, entered through the huge bronze doors, showed his identification to a uniformed cop sitting behind a desk in the marbled ground-floor corridor, and then took the elevator up to the fifth floor. A sign hand-lettered PSAS indicated by way of a pointing arrow that the office was to the right. He followed the corridor, spoiled another sign and yet a third one, and then found a door with a glass paneled top, lettered with the words Psychological Services and Aid Section.
He looked at his watch.
Five minutes to two.
He opened the door and went in.
There was a small waiting room. A closed door opposite the entrance door. Two easy chairs, a lamp, a coat rack with two coats on it, several kick-issues of People magazine. Kling hung up his coat, sat in one of the chairs and picked up a copy with Michael Jackson on the cover. In a few moments, a portly man with the telltale veined and bulbous nose of a heavy drinker came through the inner door, went to the rack, took his coat from it, and left without saying a word to Kling. He looked like a thousand sergeants Kling had known. A moment after that, a woman came through that same door.
'Detective Kling?' she said.
'Yes.'
He got to his feet.
'I'm Karin Lefkowitz. Won't you come in, please?'
Short brown hair, blue eyes. Wearing a gray dress, with pearls and Reeboks. Twenty-six or -seven, he guessed. Nice smile.
He followed her into her office. Same size as the waiting room. A wooden desk. A chair behind it. A chair in front of it. Several framed degrees on the wall. A framed picture of the police commissioner. Another framed picture of the mayor.