“Hello?” she said. She sounded rushed, a trifle breathless. She always allowed herself a scant half hour to get out of the apartment each morning, rushing from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom again, finally running for the elevator, looking miraculously well-groomed and sleek and rested and ready to do battle with the world. He visualized her standing now at the kitchen phone, only partially clothed, and felt a faint stirring of desire.
“Hi. Cindy,” he said, “it’s me.”
“Oh, hello, Bert,” she said. “Can you hold just a second? The coffee’s about to boil over.” He waited. In the promised second, she was back on the line. “Okay,” she said. “I tried to reach you the other night.”
“Yes, I know. I’m returning your call.”
“Right, right,” she said. There was a long silence. “I’m trying to remember why I called you. Oh, yes. I found a shirt of yours in the dresser, and I wanted to know what I should do with it. So I called you at home, and there was no answer, and then I figured you probably had night duty, and I tried the squadroom, but Steve said you weren’t on. So I decided to wrap it up and mail it. I’ve already got it all addressed and everything.”
There was another silence.
“So I guess I’ll drop it off at the post office on my way to work this morning,” Cindy said.
“Okay,” Kling said.
“If that’s what you want me to do,” Cindy said.
“Well, what would you like to do?”
“It’s all wrapped and everything, so I guess that’s what I’ll do.”
“Be a lot of trouble to unwrap it, I guess,” Kling said.
“Why would I want to unwrap it?”
“I don’t know. Why did you call me Saturday night?”
“To ask what you wanted me to do with the shirt.”
“What choices did you have in mind?”
“When? Saturday night?”
“Yes,” Kling said. “When you called.”
“Well, there were several possibilities, I guess. You could have stopped here to pick up the shirt, or I could have dropped it off at your place or the squadroom, or we could have had a drink together or something, at which time . . .”
“I didn’t know that was permissible.”
“Which?”
“Having a drink together. Or any of those things, in fact.”
“Well, it’s all academic now, isn’t it? You weren’t home when I called, and you weren’t working, either, so I wrapped up the goddamn shirt, and I’ll mail it to you this morning.”
“What are you sore about?”
“Who’s sore?” Cindy said.
“You sound sore.”
“I have to get out of here in twenty minutes and I still haven’t had my coffee.”
“Wouldn’t want to be late for the hospital,” Kling said. “Might upset your friend Dr. Freud.”
“Ha-ha,” Cindy said mirthlessly.
“How is he, by the way?”
“He’s fine, by the way.”
“Good.”
“Bert?”
“Yes, Cindy?”
“Never mind, nothing.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I’ll put the shirt in the mail. I washed it and ironed it, I hope it doesn’t get messed up.”
“I hope not.”
“Good-bye, Bert,” she said, and hung up.
Kling put the receiver back onto its cradle, sighed, and went into the kitchen. He ate a breakfast of grapefruit juice, coffee, and two slices of toast, and then went back into the bedroom and dialed Nora Simonov’s number. When he asked her if she would like to have lunch with him, she politely refused, saying she had an appointment with an art director. Fearful of being turned down for dinner as well, he hedged his bet by asking if she’d like to meet him for a drink at about five, five-thirty. She surprised him by saying she would love it, and they agreed to meet at The Oasis, a quiet cocktail lounge in one of the city’s oldest hotels, near the western end of Grover Park. Kling went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
434 North Sixteenth Street was a brownstone within the precinct territory, between Ainsley and Culver avenues. Meyer and Carella found a listing for an L. Kantor in one of the mailboxes downstairs, tried the inner lobby door, found it unlocked, and started up to the fourth floor without ringing the downstairs bell. They had tried calling the number listed in Sarah’s address book, but the telephone company had reported it temporarily out of service. Whether this was true or not was a serious question for debate.
“The Telephone Blues” was a dirge still being sung by most residents of the city, and it was becoming increasingly more difficult these days to know if a phone was busy, out of order, disconnected, temporarily out of service, or stolen in the night by an international band of telephone thieves. The direct-dialing system had been a brilliant innovation, except that after directly dialing the digits necessary to place a call, the caller was more often than not greeted with: (a) silence; (b) a recording; (c) a busy signal, or (d) a series of strange beeps and boops. After trying to direct-dial the same number three or four times, the caller was inevitably reduced to dealing with one or more operators (all of whom sounded as if they were in a trainee program for people with ratings of less than 48 on the Standford-Binet scale of intelligence) and sometimes actually got to talk to the party he was calling. On too many occasions, Carella visualized someone in desperate trouble trying to reach a doctor, a policeman, or a fireman. The police had a number to call for emergency assistance—but what the hell good was the number if you could never get the phone to work? Such were Carella’s thoughts as he plodded up the four flights to the apartment of Lou Kantor, the third man listed in Sarah’s address book.
Meyer knocked on the door. Both men waited. He knocked again.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice said. “Who is it?”
“Police officers,” Meyer answered.
There was a short silence. Then the woman said, “Just a moment, please.”
“Think he’s home?” Meyer whispered.
Carella shrugged. They heard footsteps approaching the door. Through the closed door, the woman said, “What do you want?”
“We’re looking for Lou Kantor,” Meyer said.
“Why?”
“Routine investigation,” Meyer said.
The door opened a crack, held by a night-chain. “Let me see your badge,” the woman said. Whatever else they had learned, the citizens of this good city knew that you always asked a cop to show his badge because otherwise he might turn out to be a robber or a rapist or a murderer, and then where were you? Meyer held up his shield. The woman studied it through the narrow opening, and then closed the door again, slipped off the night-chain, and opened the door wide.
“Come in,” she said.
They went into the apartment. The woman closed and locked the door behind them. They were standing in a small, tidy kitchen. Through a doorless doorframe, they could see into the next room, obviously the living room, with two easy chairs, a sofa, a floor lamp, and a television set. The woman was perhaps thirty-five years old, five feet eight inches tall, with a solid frame, and a square face fringed with short dark hair. She was wearing a robe over pajamas, and she was barefoot. Her eyes were blue and suspicious. She looked from one cop to the other, waiting.
“Is he here?” Meyer asked.
“Is who here?”
“Mr. Kantor.”
The woman looked at him, puzzled. Understanding suddenly flashed in her blue eyes. A thin smile formed on her mouth. “I’m Lou Kantor,” she said. “Louise Kantor. What can I do for you?”
“Oh,” Meyer said, and studied her.
“What can I do for you?” Lou repeated. The smile had vanished from her mouth; she was frowning again.