There was, however, one particular facet of police work that he did not like at all, breaking in rookies newly elevated to the detective squad.
Which, naturally, was the one assignment he invariably drew.
Di Lucca didn’t know if Captain Hearn always paired him with the rookies because he was the senior member of the squad, and patient, and well-versed in police procedure; or if it was because the captain had a well-hidden streak of leprecaunlike Irish humor; or if it was that every man is supposed to bear a sometimes heavy cross. He only knew that he always drew the rookies, and that there was nothing he could do except to steel himself and make the best of it.
There were problems with every rookie. They were overconfident, or they were too nervous, or they were top eager, or they were just plain incompetent, like that cousin of the police commissioner with whom Di Lucca had spent three painful months the year before. There was always something new to face.
Take the young rookie, Tim Corcoran, with whom he had been paired for the past three weeks. The problem with Corcoran was not cockiness or nervousness or any lack of competence. Contrarily, he was a graduate of the Police Academy who had made two admittedly fortunate arrests of a major nature within six months of one another, sufficient to get him promoted to the detective squad. And although it had taken Di Lucca twelve years of pounding a beat, in the days when beats were still pounded, to make the same grade, he didn’t in the least begrudge Corcoran’s abrupt rise. These were changing times, and youth, if capable, had to be served.
Corcoran also wore modish clothes and had hair as long as the department would-allow, plus an affinity for dark glasses and hard-rock music. That, too, was all right; Di Lucca was a progressive thinker, and two of his three sons had hair down to their rumps and wore beards and one of them was even trying to be a writer.
No, the trouble with this particular rookie, this Corcoran, was that he had an imagination.
There was nothing wrong with having an imagination, but Di Lucca thought you ought to be able to control it and to back it up with simple logic. Not so with Corcoran. He allowed this imagination of his to run wild, to the point where he forgot logic and some of the basic precepts of police work. Nothing was ever simple as far as Corcoran was concerned; there were always hidden meanings. The most routine squeals, which was all the two of them had handled thus far, became puzzles of magnitude in Corcoran’s rampant imagination.
Di Lucca had tried patiently to teach him that investigative police work was really a pretty simple, ordinary kind of thing. Cases were solved by legwork and careful observation and time-tested procedures. Corcoran said he understood that, and went right on illogically overworking his imagination.
Sitting at his desk in the squad room early one Friday morning, near the end of their first week on the night trick, Di Lucca watched Corcoran poring over the unsolved files, something the rookie did every chance he got. He was thinking, Di Lucca was: all we need now is a murder case, one of those fancy ones where you’ve got suspects and clues and a crazy set of circumstances.
And so, of course, the telephone rang...
On their way to answer the squeal, Corcoran, who was driving the departmental sedan, said for the third time since they had left the squad room, “A murder, Rennie! We’re finally going to investigate a murder.”
Di Lucca sighed. “Don’t sound so happy about it.”
“I’m not happy, I’m a little nervous,” Corcoran told him. He was tall and baby-faced, and had bright brown eyes behind his dark glasses and a lot of freckles that matched in color his stylishly shaggy hair. “The victim’s name is Simon Warren, right?”
“That’s what the guy on the phone, Prentiss, said.”
“Is he somebody important?”
“Well, I never heard the name.”
“The address is pretty important.”
“I guess it is,” Di Lucca admitted, and wished somebody else had taken the call, though it was inevitable that he and Corcoran would catch a murder squeal sooner or later. Still, he wished it had been later; and some place other than Lookout Point, which was the city’s most fashionable district.
He sat slumped on the seat, waiting patiently for Corcoran to get them through the early-morning fog to Lookout Point — a short, plump man with a sad Italian face, a receding hairline, and enormous black eyes that were at once mild and shrewd. His suit, in contrast to Corcoran’s mod-cut double-breasted, was ultra-conservative and hung badly on him. He had never been able to find an off-the-rack suit that fit him properly, and he couldn’t afford to have one tailor-made, not with three sons, one of whom was trying to be a writer.
Corcoran was silent the remainder of the trip, for which Di Lucca was grateful, and finally they reached Lookout Point and located the address Di Lucca had been given on the phone.
The house was a huge Tudor with a gabled roof, set well back from the street on elevated ground and fronted by an acre of lawn landscaped with oak trees. A paved entrance drive climbed upward on the left.
They went up the drive, and it hooked into a loop in front of the house, circling a rectangle of lawn with a stone fountain in the middle. Parked at the far edge of the circle was a black-and-white cruiser, and two uniformed cops were standing there with a red-headed woman wearing a gray jersey dress. Corcoran pulled up next to the cruiser.
Di Lucca knew the uniformed cops, and one of them said, “We just got here, Sergeant. This is Miss Becky Hughes; she lives here.”
Di Lucca introduced himself and Corcoran. Miss Hughes was in her mid-twenties, gray-eyed and abundantly endowed with female assets. Her red hair, worn flipped under, appeared to have been hastily combed; the red lacquer on her long nails was chipped, and one of the nail points had been broken or bitten off.
She said, “I was Simon Warren’s — um, secretary. It certainly is a terrible thing, what happened.”
Di Lucca nodded and asked, “Where would the deceased be?”
“Inside, in the library. Prentiss is with him.” She shuddered. “He said he wanted to make sure nothing was disturbed.”
“Anyone else in the house at the moment?”
“George Charon and Everett Finney.”
“Who would they be?”
“Simon’s nephews. They have different names because Simon had two sisters that died, you know?”
Di Lucca said, “I see. Do all of you live here?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Uh-huh. Well, suppose you show us where the library is.”
She said she would, and Di Lucca told one of the uniformed cops to remain there to wait for the lab crew; the other one went with them into the house, and across a wide foyer hung with silver-framed, antique mirrors, and down a corridor to one side.
Miss Hughes stopped before a set of double oak doors which had been pulled not quite together, leaving a six-inch gap between them.
“Here it is,” she said. “But I don’t want to go in there again, if it’s all the same to you. I can’t stand the sight of blood or dead people.” She shuddered again. “I’ll be in the parlor with George and Everett, okay? It’s the other way off the foyer.”
“All right, Miss Hughes.”
She turned and walked away down the corridor. Corcoran, with his dark glasses off, and the uniformed cop watched her appreciatively. Di Lucca was looking at the doors and deciding that they had been forced open recently; a twisted piece of metal that was part of an inside bar-lock arrangement could be seen in the opening between the two halves.
Di Lucca told the uniformed cop to stay in the corridor. Then he knocked on one of the doors, said, “Police,” loudly, and pushed it open. He and Corcoran went into the library.