Lullaby

'Yeah.'

Beside him, Marilyn grunted and rolled over.

'We're working a double homicide in the same building.'

'Oh boy,' Willis said.

'Occurred sometime between twelve-thirty and two-thirty.'

'Mine was at one-thirty,' Willis said.

'So the Ungers told us.'

'How'd you like her tits?' Willis asked.

Beside him, Marilyn rammed her elbow into his ribs.

'I didn't notice,' Carella said.

'Ha!' Willis said.

'The Ungers told us you were poking around on . . .'

'Who's us?'

'Me and Meyer. Poking around on the fire escape.'

'Yeah.'

'Did you find anything?'

'A vial of crack.'

'So what else is new?'

'Plus there looked like a lot of grimy prints on the windowsill, where he was working with a jimmy to get in. I called in for the van, but nobody showed. This was only a two-bit burglary, Steve. On New Year's Eve, no less.'

'If it's linked to a homicide . . .'

'Oh, sure, they'll dust the whole damn city for you. Two homicides, no less.'

'You mind if I give them a call?'

'Please do. We bust the burglar, I'll have an excuse to go see Shirley again.'

Marilyn gave him another poke.

'Did you file your report yet?' Carella asked.

'It's probably still sitting on Pete's desk.'

'Mind if I have a look at it?'

'Go right ahead. Let me know what happens, okay? I bust a big burglary, I'll maybe make Second Grade.'

'Don't hold your breath,' Carella said.

'Talk to you,' Willis said, and hung up.

* * * *

In this city, if your apartment got burglarized, the police sometimes sent around a team of technicians to see what they could find by way of latent fingerprints. This was if the burglary involved big bucks. A dozen fur coats, negotiable securities, expensive jewelry, cash, like that. In smaller burglaries, which most of them were, the technicians never showed. This was not negligence. Close to a hundred and twenty-five thousand burglaries had been committed in this city during the preceding year, and there were only one lieutenant, six sergeants and sixty-three detectives in the Crime Scene Unit. Moreover, these people were more urgently needed in cases of homicide, arson, and rape.

So your average responding uniformed police officer would tell the burglary victim that a detective would be handling the case, and that they could expect a visit from him within the next day or so. Which was normally true unless the detective's case load was backed up clear to China, in which event the victim wouldn't be getting a visit from him until sometimes a week, ten days, even two weeks after the burglary. The detective would then take a list of what was stolen and he would tell the victim, quite honestly, that unless they caught the perpetrator in the act of committing another burglary or else trying to pawn the stuff he'd stolen here, there wasn't much chance they'd ever find him or their goods. And then the detective would sigh for the dear, dead days when cops used to have respect for burglars.

Ah, yes, there once was a time when burglars were considered the gentlemen of the crime profession. But that was then and this was now. Nowadays, most burglars were junkie burglars. Your more experienced junkie burglars usually jimmied open a window, the way the Unger burglar had done, because they knew that nothing woke up neighbors like the sound of breaking glass. Your beginning junkie burglars didn't give a shit. Whap, smash the window with a brick wrapped in a dish towel, knock out the shards of glass with a hammer, go in, get out, and then run to your friendly neighborhood fence (who was most often your dope dealer as well) and pick up your ten cents on the dollar for what you'd stolen. Only the most inexperienced burglar went to a pawnshop to get rid of his loot. Even a twelve-year-old kid just starting to do crack knew that cops sent out lists of stolen goods to every pawnshop in the city. To take your stuff to a pawnshop, you had to be either very dumb or else so strung out you couldn't wait another minute. Either that, or you were visiting from Mars.

So the chances of the Crime Scene Unit showing up at the Unger apartment were very slight, when one considered that the only items stolen were an emerald ring purchased in Italy for the sum of $2000, which gave you some idea of the quality of the emerald; a VCR that had cost $249 on sale at Sears; and an admittedly expensive cloth coat which was, nonetheless, merely a cloth coat. In a city crawling with addicts of every color and stripe, in a city that was the nation's drug capital, the dollar amount of your average burglary haul fell somewhat lower than what had been stolen from the Ungers, but this was still nothing to go shouting in the streets about and nobody down at the lab was about to dispatch the van for a garden-variety burglary, for Christ's sake, when people were getting killed all over the place, for Christ's sake!

Until Carella called in to say they had a double homicide and that one of the victims was a six-month-old baby.

* * * *

In the private sector, if a CEO asked for an immediate report on something which in his business would have been the equivalent of a homicide, that report would have been on his desk in the morning. All two hundred and twenty pages of it. Otherwise, heads would have rolled. But this was not the private sector. This was civil service work. Considering, then, that New Year's Day was a Sunday and that the holiday was officially celebrated on a Monday, Carella and Meyer were hoping that by the end of the week - maybe - they'd have some urgently needed information from the Latent Print Unit. If one of the forty-three examiners assigned to that unit could come up with a match on the prints the Crime Scene boys had lifted from the Unger windowsill; if they could further match the prints on the handle of the Flynn murder weapon with prints in the Identification Section's files, everybody could go to Lake Como for a vacation.

On Tuesday morning, the third day of the New Year, they had a long talk with Annie Flynn's parents. Harry Flynn worked as a stockbroker for a firm all the way downtown in the Old City; the walls of the Flynn apartment were covered with oils he painted in whatever spare time he managed to salvage from his rigorous routine. His wife - neither a Molly nor a Maggie but a Helen instead - was secretary to the president of a firm in the garment district; she mentioned the name of the clothing line, but neither of the detectives was familiar with it. This was now ten o'clock in the morning. The Flynns were dressed to go to the funeral home. He was wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. His wife was wearing a simple black dress, low-heeled black pumps, and dark glasses.

The detectives did not yet know where to hang their hats.

The Flynns came up with a possible peg.

'Scott Handler,' Flynn said.

'Her boyfriend,' Mrs Flynn said.

'Used to be, anyway.'

'Until Thanksgiving.'

'Broke off with him when he came down for the Thanksgiving weekend.'

'The long weekend they had in Thanksgiving.'

'Broke off with him then.'

'Came down from where?' Carella asked.

'Maine. He goes to a private school in Maine.'

'How old is he?' Meyer asked.

'Eighteen,' Mrs Flynn said. 'He's a senior at the Prentiss Academy in Caribou, Maine. Right up there near the Canadian border.'

'They'd been going together since she was fifteen,' Flynn said.

'And you say she broke off with him in November?'

'Yes. Told me she was going to do it,' Mrs Flynn said. 'Told me she'd outgrown him. Can you imagine that? Sixteen years old, she'd outgrown somebody.' Mrs Flynn shook her head. Her husband put his hand on her arm in, comforting her.

'Called the house day and night,' Mrs Flynn said. 'Used to burst into tears whenever I told him she didn't want to talk to him. Spent hours talking to me instead. This was long distance from Maine, mind you. Wanted to know what he'd done wrong. Kept asking me if he'd done something. I really felt sorry for him.'