What he found instead was a massive assault on the uterus by a sharp instrument with a saw-toothed edge. The instrument had passed through the cervix, wreaking havoc in its relentless wake, and had ripped through the abdominal cavity where it caused hugely significant damage; Blaney found eighteen inches of the small intestine severed and hanging in the uterus. The pain would have been excruciating. Hemorrhaging would have been profuse. The girl could have died within minutes.
Which might have been a blessing, he guessed.
Only one of the three Richards knew he had just for the fun of it inserted a bread knife with a serrated blade into the girl's vagina. The other two didn't know such a thing had happened although later they saw a lot of blood running down the inside of her legs and figured it was the black guy with his big shlong had hurt her somehow. Even the one who'd experimented with the knife didn't realize this was what had killed her. He figured the bag over her head had done it, the girl's stupidity in not informing them that the game had gone too far. She should have told them. No one had wanted her dead. Every one of them wanted black Richard dead. Black Richard was their link to the dead girl, who had died by accident, after all, and for whom they most certainly were not about to ruin their lives, all three of them accepted at Harvard?. Hey.
So as Richard thrashed around in the tub, trying to keep his head above water, the three other Richards kept forcing him back under again, time after time, avoiding his pummeling fists, trying not to get
themselves all wet, trying just to for Christ's sake drown him.
They were succeeding in doing just that, finally succumbing to their overpowering insistence subsiding below the surface of the water, unclenching at last, a final thin bubble of air his mouth and rising, rising, when a voice behind them yelled, "The fuck you doin?"
They were each and separately, all three Richards overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of deja vu all again, a black man standing there with outraged surprise on his face, only this time Richard the First had a knife, and he snapped the blade open at once because the last thing on earth they needed was another asshole linking them to a murder.
Jamal remembered too late what his sacred mother taught him about the streets of this here city, it was Mind your own business, son, an stay out of harms way. But this wasn't a city street, this was the bathroom of a onetime business associate sometime friend, and he was being drowned in his own bathtub by three fuckin college boys, or whatever they were, and one of them had a knife in his fist and he was coming at Jamal with a tiny little smile on his face. It was then that Jamal knew this was serious. Man with a big mother knife in his hand and a smile on his face was dangerous. But, of course, all of this was too late, the memory of his mother's admonition, the memory of smiles he had seen on the faces of other would-be assassins, of whom there were far too many in this part of the city in this part of the world.
Smiling, Richard the First slashed Jamal's jugular with a single swipe of the blade, and then dropped the knife as if it were on fire.
The other two Richards went pale.
And now it became the tale of a handbag.
The door to Svetlana Dyalovich's apartment was padlocked and a printed CRIME SCENE notice was tacked to it. But Meyer and Kling had obtained a key from the Property Clerk's Office, and they marched right in.
"What a dump," Meyer said. "Smells, too," Kling said. "Cat piss," Meyer agreed.
A pair of uniformed cops had already delivered the old lady's dead cat to the Humane Society for cremation, but Meyer and Kling didn't know that, and besides the apartment still stank. They did know that Carella and Hawes, and presumably the technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit, had conducted a thorough search of the apartment. But this morning Carella had suggested that they might have missed something namely a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and another run-through might be a good idea.
They both thought about that kind of money for a moment.
A hundred and twenty-five thousand was about a third more than their combined annual salaries. It was a sobering thought. They began looking.
There was a dead man in the bathtub and another dead man on the bathroom floor. One of them had been drowned, and the other's throat had been slit. This almost had comic possibilities. Too bad the one bleeding all over the tile floor wasn't named Richard, too. Then there would have been five Richards in the apartment instead of just four, three of whom were running around looking for a red patent-leather bag. The fourth one wasn't doing any running at all. The fourth one would never do any running ever again Nor swimming, either, which he'd never learned to do, anyway. None of the live Richards knew who the other dead man was, and they were squeamish about going through his pockets for identification. Slitting a man's throat was one thing. Frisking him was quite another.
Richard the First knew the girl's handbag had to be in this apartment someplace. It didn't have legs, did it?: She herself had carried it up here, and they themselves had carried her out of here without it. So where the was it? He was eager to find that bag because it contained traveler's checks with their signatures on them, and these could all too easily link them to the dead girl, and by extension the man they'd drowned and the one whose throat they'd slit.
In his mind, the three Richards had acted and were still acting in concert. No longer was it he alone who'd slit the second black man's throat. Now it was they who'd done it. Just as it was they who were now looking for the patent-leather bag that would irrevocably tie them to the girl who'd died by accident because she'd been too reticent to tell them she was having difficulty breathing. An asthmatic shouldn't
have been in her profession, anyway, the things unfeeling men asked her to do with her mouth.
Neither of the other two Richards quite shared the first Richard's feelings about the second murder. The first murder, of course, was drowning black Richard in the tub, a necessity. The girl had not been murdered; you couldn't count her as a murder victim. All of them firmly believed, the girl had died by accident. However, both the second Richard and the third Richard knew damn well that neither of them had slit the black stranger's throat, whoever he may have been and no longer was. Richard the First was solely responsible for that little bit of mayhem. So whereas they dutifully turned that apartment upside down, trying to find that elusive handbag, they did so only because they didn't want the dead girl to come back to haunt them. And though neither of them would dare speak such a blasphemy aloud, if push ever came to shove they were quite willing to throw old Lion-Heart here to the lions.
At the end of a half hour's search, they still had not found the bag.
It was now twenty minutes to two.
"Where would you be if you were a red patent-leather handbag?" Richard the First asked. "Where indeed?" Richard the Second asked. Richard the Third stood in the center of the room, scratching his ass and thinking. "Let's reconstruct it minute by minute," he said. "From when we first met her on the street to when we carried her out of here."
"Oh yes, let's do that," Richard the Second said sarcastically. "Two dead Negroes in the bathroom,
with more of their friends possibly coming to visit, we have all the time in the world."
Richard the First hadn't heard anyone using the word "Negroes" in a very long time.
"She definitely had that bag in her hand when she stepped out of the taxi," he said.
"She had it here in this apartment, too," Richard the Third said. "She put the traveler's checks and the jumbos in it. I saw her do that with my own eyes."
"Okay, so where did she put it when we started making love?"