“This stuff tastes awful,” Kling said, “but I’ve been hungry as hell, ever since I got in here. I could almost eat the tray.”
“When are you getting out?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ve got a broken rib, nice, huh?”
“Very nice,” Carella said.
“I’m lucky they didn’t mess up my insides,” Kling said. “That’s what the doctors were afraid of, internal hemorrhaging. But I’m okay, it seems. They taped up the rib, and whereas I won’t be able to do my famous trapeze act for a while, I should be able to get around.”
“Who did it, Bert?”
“Three locomotives, it felt like.”
“Why?”
“A warning to stay away from Nora Simonov.”
“Were you seeing a lot of her?”
“I saw her twice. Apparently someone saw me seeing her. And decided to put me in the hospital. Little did they know I’m a minion of the law, huh?”
“Little did they know,” Carella said.
“I’ll have to ask Nora a few questions when I get out of here. How’s the case going?”
“I’ve located Fletcher’s girlfriend.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“Brown tailed them last night, got an address for her, but no name. Fletcher just sent her some underwear.”
“Nice,” Kling said.
“Very nice. I’m getting a court order to put a wire in the apartment.”
“What do you expect them to talk about?”
“Bloody murder maybe,” Carella said, and shrugged. Both men were silent for several moments.
“You know what I want for Christmas?” Kling asked suddenly.
“What?”
“I want to find those guys who beat me up.”
13
T he man who picked the lock on Arlene Orton’s front door, ten minutes after she left her apartment on Wednesday morning, was better at it than any burglar in the city, and he happened to work for the Police Department. He had the door open in three minutes flat, at which time a technician went in and wired the joint. It took the technician longer to set up his equipment than it had taken his partner to open the door, but both were artists in their own right, and the sound man had a lot more work to do.
The telephone was the easiest of his jobs. He unscrewed the carbon mike in the mouthpiece of the phone, replaced it with his own mike, attached his wires, screwed the mouthpiece back on, and was instantly in business—or almost in business. The tap would not become operative until the telephone company supplied the police with a list of so-called bridging points that located the pairs and cables for Arlene Orton’s phone. The monitoring equipment would be hooked into these, and whenever a call went out of or came into the apartment, a recorder would automatically tape both ends of the conversation. In addition, whenever a call was made from the apartment, a dial indicator would ink out a series of dots that signified the number being called. The police listener would be monitoring the equipment from wherever the bridging point happened to be; in Arlene Orton’s case, the location index was seven blocks away.
The technician, while he had Arlene’s phone apart, could just as easily have installed a bug that would have picked up any voices in the living room and would also have recorded Arlene’s half of any telephone conversations. He chose instead to place his bug in the bookcase on the opposite side of the room. The bug was a small FM transmitter with a battery-powered mike that needed to be changed every twenty-four hours. It operated on the same frequency as the recording machine locked into it, a machine that was voice-actuated and that would begin taping whenever anyone began speaking in the apartment. The technician would have preferred running his own wires, rather than having to worry about changing a battery every twenty-four hours. But running wires meant that you had to pick a place to run them to, usually following electrical or telephone circuits to an empty apartment or closet or what-have-you where a policeman would monitor the recording equipment. If a tap was being set up in a hotel room, it was usually possible to rent the room next door, put your listener into it, and go about your messy business without anyone being the wiser. But in this city, empty apartments were about as scarce as working telephones, and whereas the wire was being installed by court order, the technician dared not ask the building superintendent for an empty closet or a workroom in which to hide his listener. Building supers are perhaps not as garrulous as barbers, but the effectiveness of a wiretap is directly proportionate to the secrecy surrounding it, and a blabbermouth superintendent can kill an investigation more quickly than a squad of gangland goons.
So the technician settled upon the battery-powered mike and resigned himself to the fact that every twenty-four hours he and his partner would have to get into the apartment somehow to change the goddamn batteries. In all, there would be four sets of batteries to change because the technician was planting four bugs in the apartment: one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one in the bathroom, and one in the living room. While he worked, his partner was down in the lobby with a walkie-talkie in his coat pocket, ready to let him know the moment Arlene Orton came back to the building, and ready to detain her by ruse if necessary. Watching the clock, the technician worked swiftly and silently, hoping the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt would not erupt with his partner’s warning voice. He was not worried about legal action against the city; the court order, in effect, gave him permission to break and enter. He worried only about blowing the surveillance.
In the rear of a panel truck parked at the curb some twelve feet south of the entrance to 812 Crane, Steve Carella sat behind the recording equipment that was locked into the frequency of the four bugs. He knew that in some neighborhoods a phony truck was as readily recognizable as the cop on the beat. Put a man in the back of a fake delivery truck, park the truck on the street and start taking pictures of people going in and out of a candy store suspected of being a numbers drop, and all of a sudden the neighborhood was full of budding stars and starlets, all of whom knew there was a cop-photographer in the back of the truck, all of whom mugged and pranced and emoted shamelessly for the movie camera, while managing to conduct not an iota of business that had anything at all to do with the policy racket. It got discouraging. But Crane Street was in one of the city’s better neighborhoods, where perhaps the citizens were not as wary of cops hiding in the backs of panel trucks doing their dirty watching and listening. Carella sat hopefully with a tuna-fish sandwich and a bottle of beer, prepared to hear and record any sounds that emanated from Arlene’s apartment.
At the bridging point seven blocks away and thirty minutes later, Arthur Brown sat behind equipment that was hooked into the telephone mike, and waited for Arlene Orton’s phone to ring. He was in radio contact with Carella in the back of his phony panel truck and could apprise him of any new development at once.
The first call came at 12:17 P . M . The equipment tripped in automatically, and the spools of tape began recording the conversation while Brown simultaneously monitored it through his headphones.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Arlene?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“Nan.”
“Nan? You sound so different. Do you have a cold or something?”
“Every year at this time. Just before the holidays. Arlene, I’m terribly rushed, I’ll make this short. Do you know Beth’s dress size?”
“A ten, I would guess. Or an eight.”
“Well, which?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you give Danny a ring?”
“Do you have his office number?”
“No, but he’s listed. It’s Reynolds and Abelman. In Calm’s Point.”