"Temperature dropped," Ness noted.
"Let me in, damnit! Freezing my nuts off, pardon my French."
Ness made a sweeping gesture for him to enter and Wild stepped in, shutting the door himself, then said, "Nice and toasty in here."
Ness said, sotto voce, "It's Ev's birthday, Sam. We're celebrating. This sure as hell better be important."
"It's important, all right. Your own people have been trying to call you for over an hour."
"What do you mean, trying?"
Ev's voice came from just behind him; she had snuck up on the great detective. "I'm afraid I took the phone off the hook," she admitted. "Right before dinner."
He turned and looked at her sharply.
She winced.
He sighed and worked to soften his look and, with a tense smile, said, "Please don't ever do that."
"I'm sorry," she said. She obviously meant it, but her feelings were hurt. She slipped back into the living room. He turned back to Wild.
"So?" he said, irritated.
"You ever hear of a cop named Willis? Clifford Willis?"
"No."
"He's a white cop working the Negro district. Or he was."
"Was?"
"He got shot tonight."
"Oh, Christ. Where?"
"If you're talking anatomy, he got shot a lot of places. If you're talking geography, the body turned up in the front yard of a house on Hawthorne."
"Christ! That's just a block off Central…"
"Yes. A very lively colored neighborhood. And a very dead white cop. Your boys are at the scene right now. I volunteered to come fetch you."
Ness nodded. "What's the exact address?"
"5718 Hawthorne."
"Okay. Thanks, Sam. You go on. I'll be along in my own car, in a minute."
Wild nodded, said, "Sorry I busted in on your, uh, celebration."
"Don't give it a thought. See you at the scene."
Wild nodded again and went out.
Ness went into the living room, where Ev was sitting quietly, even morosely, staring at the dwindling fire.
He stood before her. "You want me to throw a few logs on before I go?"
He didn't wait for her to answer, just went ahead and did it. Got the fire going again, strong; it blazed, casting an orange glow on them.
She looked up at him yearningly. "Must you go?"
He put the iron poker back and sat down next to her. "Cop killing in the colored district."
"I understand," she said. And she did. There was nothing whiney about it; disappointment, yes-but not resentment.
He sat with her for a moment. "I didn't mean to snap at you."
"I shouldn't have taken the phone off the hook."
He said nothing.
"I just wanted to spend one damn evening with you. Is that a crime?" Here was some resentment. But no bitterness, at least.
"It's not a crime," he said. "It is a crime, leaving you alone on your birthday, though. Tell you what."
"What?"
"Make you a deal. I won't hold it against you, for the phone, if you don't hold it against me, for going."
She smiled wickedly. "Maybe I want you to hold it against me."
"Hold what against you? Oh. That. Listen, doll, I gotta go…"
"This minute?"
"This minute."
He stood.
She looked beautiful, hair around her shoulders, clothes in vague disarray. "Can I wait up for you?"
"Sure. I'll try not to be long. Keep the fire going, why don't you? But if you do go up to bed, I'll wake you when I get home."
"You better."
He found his tie and put it on and the shoulder holster, too, though he left the gun behind. He was putting on his topcoat when she called to him from the living room.
"Eliot! Thank you. Thank you for the diamond."
"You're welcome, doll. Don't let the fire go out."
"I won't," she said, "if you won't."
CHAPTER 11
Albert Curry stood looking down at the corpse, wishing it could talk.
Nervously, the cold knifing through his topcoat, he checked his watch. It was approaching nine o'clock and this slightly seedy residential neighborhood, trapped behind a wall of factories, a block north of Central off 55th, was quiet as a funeral. Quieter. Traffic was nonexistent. There were no curbside gawkers, just occasional white eyes in dark windows-not many lights on, for this time of evening. Only a few of the streetlamps were working. If it hadn't been for half a moon up in a clear, starry sky, the street would have been darker than its residents.
The paint-peeling buildings on this narrow street were for the most part your typical wide-front-porch Cleveland duplexes, run-down versions of the one he'd grown up in, and his parents still lived in, on the far east side.
On the sidewalk inside the wire fence of a small front yard filled with well-tended bushes, Toussaint Johnson stood talking to the colored couple who lived in one of the exceptions on this street: a small, neat single-family dwelling. The body had been found in their front yard, or anyway the slice of it between the front sidewalk and the wire fence. They had put frayed winter coats on over their pajamas and the man had an arm around the shoulder of his wife, who leaned into him, shivering with the cold, among other things. The husband had called in the discovery.
Curry, whose pencil and notepad were in hand, noticed that Johnson wasn't taking any field notes. That broke a fundamental rule of crime-scene technique; but Curry knew very well by now that Johnson was not a by-the-book cop. A good cop, possibly even a great cop. But not a by-the-book one.
In this instance, Curry couldn't blame him. Taking notes would only make the husband and wife ill at ease; and the benefit of having a colored cop questioning colored witnesses might well be lost.
Curry had already used ropes looped through iron stakes to fence off the corpse; he did this at the left and right, at the approximate property line, and the wire fence and the stakes with ropes made a three-sided wall. Only the street side itself was unenclosed. Using the two-way radio in his unmarked car, he had called the Detective Bureau and asked if Sergeant Merlo was on duty-which, thankfully, he was-and Merlo, who said he would call the coroner himself, should be arriving any minute now.
Curry had also called over to the Third Precinct for more uniformed men, to help preserve the crime scene, but they hadn't gotten here yet. The two uniformed cops who had got to the scene first were standing in the street; they had high-way flares lit, burning orangely in the night, helping keep this deserted street deserted.
Curry and Johnson had been on the east side that evening, as usual, rounding up numbers-racket witnesses, when they heard the call come in over the police radio. They had tried to reach Ness, and had no luck; Curry stopped at a pay phone and tried the press room at City Hall, which was across from the safety director's office, figuring Sam Wild would be there. He was, but didn't know where Ness was; Wild asked Curry what the hell was going on, off-the-record, and Curry told him. Wild said he'd do his best to round Ness up, and that had been half an hour ago. No sign of either of them.
On the porch Johnson was shaking hands with the husband, and the wife was smiling a little, timidly, but smiling. They went back in their house and Johnson came down from the porch. He didn't go out the front gate. He walked over to one side of the yard, between some bushes, hopped the wire fence, and walked around on the other side of the staked-off area. He stood in the street as near as he could to Curry and the corpse without getting on the grass.
All of which went to show. Curry noted, that Johnson knew something about crime-scene preservation, when he felt like it.
"How long this joker been dead?"