“No, you’re doing fine,” Kling said.
“I normally detest people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. God, are they boring! Anyway, do we have to have lunch, I’m not even hungry yet. What time is it?”
“A little after twelve.”
“Couldn’t we walk a little and just talk? If we did, I wouldn’t feel I was compromising my grand amour,” she said, rolling her eyes, “and you wouldn’t feel you were wasting lunch on a completely unresponsive dud.”
“I would love to walk and talk a little,” Kling said.
They walked.
The city that Thursday nine days before Christmas was overcast with menacing clouds; the weather bureau had promised a heavy snowfall before midafternoon. Moreover, a sharp wind was blowing in off the river, swirling in cruel eddies through the narrow streets of the financial district that bordered the municipal and federal courts. Nora walked with her head ducked against the wind, her fine brown hair whipping about her head with each fierce gust. As a defense against the wind, which truly seemed determined to blow her off the sidewalk, she took Kling’s arm as they walked, and on more than one occasion turned her face into his shoulder whenever the blasts became too violent. Kling began wishing she hadn’t already warned him off. As she chattered on about the weather and about how much she liked the look of the city just before Christmas, he entertained wild fantasies of male superiority: bold, handsome, witty, intelligent, sensitive cop pierces armor of young, desirable girl, stealing her away from ineffectual idiot she adores . . .
“The people, too,” Nora said. “Something happens to them just before Christmas, they get, I don’t know, grander in spirit.”
Young girl, in turn, realizing she has been waiting all these years for handsome witty, etc., cop lavishes adoration she had previously wasted on mealy-mouthed moron . . .
“Even though I recognize it’s been brutalized and commercialized, it reaches me, it really does. And that’s surprising because I’m Jewish, you know. We never celebrated Christmas when I was a little girl.”
“How old are you?” Kling asked.
“Twenty-four. Are you Jewish?”
“No.”
“Kling,” Nora said, and shrugged. “It could be Jewish.”
“Is your boyfriend Jewish?”
“No, he’s not.”
“Are you engaged?”
“Not exactly. But we do plan to get married.”
“What does he do?”
“I’d rather not talk about him, if you don’t mind,” Nora said.
They did not talk about him again that afternoon. They walked through streets aglow with lighted Christmas trees, passing shop windows hung with tinsel and wreaths. Streetcorner Santa Clauses jingled their bells and solicited donations; Salvation Army musicians blew their tubas and trombones, shook their tambourines, and likewise asked for funds; shoppers hurried from store to store clutching giftwrapped packages while overhead the clouds grew thicker and more menacing.
Nora told him that she usually kept regular working hours in the studio she had set up in one room of her large, rent-controlled apartment. (“Except once a week, when I go up to Riverhead to visit my mother, which is where I was all day yesterday while you were trying to reach me”), and that she did many different kinds of freelance design, from book jackets to theatrical posters, from industrial brochures to line drawings for cookbooks, color illustrations for children’s books, and what-have-you. (“I’m usually kept very busy. It isn’t just the art work, you know, it’s running around to see editors and producers and authors and all sorts of people. I’ll be damned if I’ll give twenty-five percent of my income to an art agent. That’s what some of them are getting these days, don’t you think there should be a law?”) She had studied art at Cooper Union in New York City, and then had gone on for more training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then had come here a year ago to work for an advertising firm named Thadlow, Brunner, Growling and Crowe (“His name really was Growling, Anthony Growling”) where she had lasted for little more than six months, doing illustrations of cans and cigarette packages and other such rewarding subjects before she’d decided to quit and begin freelancing. (“So that’s the story of my life.”)
It was almost three o’clock.
Kling suspected he was already halfway in love with her, but it was time to get back to the squadroom. He took her uptown in a taxi, and just before she got out in front of her building on Silvermine Oval, on the off-chance that her earlier protestations of undying love were in the nature of a ploy, he said, “I enjoyed this, Nora. Can I see you again sometime?”
She looked at him with an oddly puzzled expression, as though she had tried her best to make it abundantly clear that she was otherwise involved and had, through some dire fault of her own, failed to communicate the idea to him. She smiled briefly and sadly, shook her head, and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Then she got out of the taxi and was gone.
Among Sarah Fletcher’s personal effects that were considered of interest to the police before they arrested Ralph Corwin was an address book found in the dead woman’s handbag on the bedroom dresser. In the Thursday afternoon stillness of the squadroom, Carella examined the book while Meyer and Kling discussed the potency of the copper bracelet Kling wore on his wrist. The squadroom was unusually quiet; a person could actually hear himself think. The typewriters were silent, the telephones were not ringing, there were no prisoners in the detention cage yelling their heads off about police brutality or human rights, and all the windows were tightly closed, shutting out even the noises of the street below. In deference to the calm (and also because Carella seemed so hard at work with Sarah Fletcher’s address book), Meyer and Kling spoke in what amounted to whispers.
“I can only tell you,” Meyer said, “that the bracelet is supposed to work miracles. Now what else can I tell you?”
“You can tell me how come it hasn’t worked any miracles on me so far?”
“When did you put it on?” Meyer said.
“I marked it on my calendar,” Kling said. They were sitting in the corner of the squadroom closest to the detention cage, Kling in a wooden chair behind his desk, Meyer perched on one end of the desk. The desk was against the wall, and the wall was covered with departmental flyers, memos on new rules and regulations, next year’s Detectives’ Duty Chart (listing Night Duty, Day Duty, and Open Days for each of the squad’s six detective teams), a cartoon clipped from the police magazine every red-blooded cop subscribed to, several telephone numbers of complainants Kling hoped to get back to before his tour ended, a photograph of Cindy Forrest (which he’d meant to take down), and several less-flattering mug shots of wanted criminals. Kling’s calendar was buried under the morass on the wall; he had to take down an announcement for the P.B.A.’s annual New Year’s Eve party to get at it. “Here,” he said. “You gave me the bracelet on December first.”
“And today’s what?” Meyer asked.
“Today’s the sixteenth.”
“How do you know I gave it to you on the first?”
“That’s what the MB stands for. Meyer’s bracelet.”
“All right, so that’s exactly two weeks. So what do you expect? I told you it’d begin working in two weeks.”
“You said ten days.”
“I said two weeks.”
“Anyway, it’s more than two weeks.”
“Listen, Bert, the bracelet works miracles, it can cure anything from arthritis to . . .”