SCHEINER: Yes. Except for when I moved the ambulance.
WEEKS: When was that?
SCHEINER: About eleven o’clock, I think it was. I moved it into the alley behind the hotel. That was after I learned where the service courtyard was.
WEEKS: Then what?
SCHEINER: Then I came around to the front again — because the alley door was locked, I couldn’t get in that way. And I was just coming through the revolving doors when I saw them standing there, just inside the doors — he was taking a picture of her and another man. I turned away, I walked toward the phone booths.
WEEKS: How’d you find out what room they were in?
SCHEINER: I picked up a house phone in the lobby, and asked.
WEEKS: You see that? You see what they’ll tell you? You walk in any hotel in this city, you ask them what room Mr. so-and-so is in, they’ll tell you. Unless he’s a celebrity. How’d you get into the room, Scheiner?
SCHEINER: I used a slat from a Venetian blind.
WEEKS: How come you know how to do that? What are you, a burglar?
SCHEINER: No, no. I drive an ambulance.
WEEKS: Then how’d you learn about that?
SCHEINER: I have read books.
WEEKS: And you learned how to loid a door, huh?
SCHEINER: I learned how to force a door, to push back the bolt.
WEEKS: That’s loiding.
SCHEINER: I don’t know what you call it.
WEEKS: But you know how to do it pretty good, don’t you, you
shithead? Didn’t you know there was a cop in that room? He could’ve blown your head off the minute you opened the door.
SCHEINER: I did not think he would have a gun on his wedding day. Besides, I was prepared.
WEEKS: For what?
SCHEINER: To kill him.
WEEKS: Why?
SCHEINER: For taking her from me.
They put Kling and Augusta into a taxi, and then they went out for hamburgers and coffee. Fat Ollie Weeks ate six hamburgers. He did not say a word all the while he was eating. He had finished his six hamburgers and three cups of coffee before Meyer and Carella finished what they had ordered, and then he sat back against the red Leatherette booth, and belched, and said, “That man was a fuckin’ lunatic. I’da cracked the case earlier if only we hadn’t been dealing with a lunatic. Lunatics are very hard to fathom.” He belched again. “I’ll bet old Augusta ain’t gonna forget this for a while, huh?”
“I guess not,” Meyer said.
“I wonder if he got in her pants,” Ollie said.
“Ollie,” Carella said very softly, “if I were you, I wouldn’t ever again wonder anything like that aloud. Ever, Ollie. You understand me?”
“Oh, sure,” Ollie said.
“Ever,” Carella said.
“Yeah, yeah, relax already, will ya?” Ollie said. “I think I’ll have another hamburger. You guys feel like another hamburger?”
So Long as You Both Shall Live, 1976
The car windows were open, the heat ballooned around the two men as Carella edged the vehicle through the heavy lunch-hour traffic. He glanced sidelong at Kling, who was staring straight ahead through the windshield, and then said, “Tell me.”
“I’m not sure I want to talk about it,” Kling said.
“Then why’d you bring it up?”
“‘Cause it’s been driving me crazy for the past month.”
“Let’s start from the beginning, okay?” Carella said.
The beginning, as Kling painfully and haltingly told it, had been on the Fourth of July, when he and Augusta were invited out to Sands Spit for the weekend. Their host was one of the photographers with whom Augusta had worked many times in the past. Carella, listening, remembered the throng of photographers, agents, and professional models, like Augusta, who had been guests at their wedding almost four years ago.
“… on the beach out there in Westphalia,” Kling was saying, “Beautiful house set on the dunes, two guest rooms. We went out on the third, and there was a big party the next day, models, photographers… well, you know the crowd Gussie likes to run with. That was when I got the first inkling, at the party.”
He had never felt too terribly close to his wife’s friends and associates, Kling said; they had, in fact, had some big arguments in the past over what he called her “tinsel crowd.” He supposed much of his discomfort had to do with the fact that as a Detective/Third he was earning $24,600 a year, whereas his wife was earning $100 an hour as a top fashion model; the joint IRS return they’d filed in April had listed their combined incomes as a bit more than $100,000 for the previous year. Moreover, most of Augusta’s friends were also earning that kind of money, and whereas she felt no qualms about inviting eight or ten of them for dinner at any of the city’s most expensive restaurants and signing for the tab afterward (“She keeps telling me they’re business associates, it’s all deductible,” Kling said), he always tell somewhat inadequate at such feasts, something like a poor relative visiting a rich city cousin, or — worse — something like a kept man. Kling himself preferred small dinner parties at their apartment with friends of his from the police force, people like Carella and his wife, Teddy, and Cotton Hawes and any one of his dozens of girlfriends, or Artie and Connie Brown, or Meyer Meyer and his wife, Sarah — people he knew and liked, people he could feel relaxed with.
The party out there on the beach in Westphalia, some hundred and thirty miles from the city in Sagamore County, was pretty much the same as all the parties Augusta dragged him to in the city. She’d get through with a modeling job at four, five in the afternoon, and if he’d been working the Day Tour, he’d be off at four and would get back to the apartment at about the same time she did, and she’d always have a cocktail party to go to, either at a photographer’s studio or the offices of some fashion magazine, or some other model’s apartment, or her agent’s — always someplace to go. There were times he’d be following some cheap hood all over the city, walking the pavements flat and getting home exhausted and wanted nothing more than a bottle of beer, and the place would be full of flitty photographers or gorgeous models talking about the latest spread in Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, drinking the booze Augusta paid for out of her earnings, and wanting to know all about how it felt to shoot somebody (“Have you ever actually killed a person, Bert?”), as if police work were the same kind of empty game modeling was. It irked him every time Augusta referred to herself as a “mannequin.” It made her seem as shallow as the work she did, a hollow store-window dummy draped in the latest Parisian fashions.
“Well, what the hell,” Kling said, “you make allowances, am I right? I’m a cop, she’s a model, we both knew that before we got married. So, okay, you compromise. If Gussie doesn’t like to cook, we’ll send out for Chink’s whenever anybody from the squad’s coming over with his wife. And if I’ve just been in a shoot-out with an armed robber, the way I was two weeks ago when that guy tried to hold up the bank on Culver and Third, then I can’t be expected to go to a gallery opening or a cocktail party, or a benefit, or whatever the hell, Gussie’ll just have to go alone, am I right?”
Which is just the way they’d been working it for the past few months now. Augusta running off to this or that glittering little party while Kling took off his shoes, and sat wearily in front of the television set drinking beer till she got home, when generally they’d go out for a bite to eat. That was if he was working the Day Tour. If he was working the Night Watch, he’d get home bone weary at nine-thirty in the morning, and maybe, if he was lucky, catch breakfast with her before she ran off to her first assignment. A hundred dollars an hour was not pumpkin seeds, and — as Augusta had told him time and again — in her business it was important to make hay while the sun was shining; how many more years of successful modeling could she count on? So off she’d run to this or that photographer’s studio, rushing out of the apartment with a kerchief on her head and her shoulder bag flying, leaving Kling to put the dishes in the dishwasher before going directly to bed, where he’d sleep till six that night and then go out to dinner with her when she got home from her usual cocktail party. After dinner, maybe, and nowadays less and less frequently, they’d make love before he had to leave for the station house again at twelve-thirty in the morning. But that was only on the two days a month he caught the Night Watch.