He went back up the hallway again to the Leyden apartment, decided to enter instead by the service entrance, and walked to the small cul-de-sac at the end of the corridor. The garbage cans for all three apartments were stacked on the small landing there. The back doors to the Leibowitz and Pimm apartments were on one side of the landing, the back door to the Leyden apartment opposite them. Without trying to figure out what was obviously a complicated architectural scheme, Carella reached into his side pocket for the key he had signed out downtown at the Office of the Clerk yesterday (premeditation, Teddy would claim, you knew you weren’t going to take down those screens today) and approached the Leydens’ kitchen door. He had a little trouble turning the key in the lock (should be using my goddamn skeleton, he thought) but finally managed to twist it and open the door. He had a bit more trouble extricating the key, yanked it loose at last, put it back into his side pocket, and closed the door behind him.
The apartment was silent.
This is where the killer must have stood, he thought. He must have entered through this door, and hesitated for a moment in the kitchen, trying to determine where his victims were. Rose Leyden had doubtless heard something and come into the living room to investigate, and that was when he’d fired the two shots that had taken off her face.
Carella moved into the living room.
The rug was still stained, the blood having dried to a muddy brown color. He looked down at the huge smear where Rose Leyden’s head had rested, and then glanced toward the bedroom. Andrew Leyden had probably been asleep, exhausted after his long trip home, shocked into wakefulness by the two shots that had killed his wife. He had most likely jumped out of bed, perhaps yelling his wife’s name (was that the shouting one of the tenants had reported hearing?) and started for the living room only to be met by the killer in the bedroom doorway.
Carella nodded, and walked across the room.
The killer probably stopped right here, he thought, firing into Leyden’s face, you have to hate somebody a hell of a lot to fire a shotgun at point-blank range into his face. Twice. Carella took a step into the bedroom. He saw that the top drawer of the dresser was open, and he recalled instantly that it had not been open on the morning after the murders, and he wondered whether the lab boys had left it that way, and he was starting toward the dresser to investigate when somebody came from behind the door and hit him on the head.
He thought as he fell toward the bedroom floor that you can get stupid if people hit you on the head often enough and then, stupidly, he lost consciousness.
It is easy to solve murder cases if you are alert.
It is also easy to get beat up if you are not careful. Bert Kling was not too terribly alert that afternoon, and so he did not come even close to solving the Leyden case. Being careless, he got beat up.
He got beat up by a woman.
Anne Gilroy marched up the front steps of the station house at ten minutes to 3:00, wearing a blue-and-red striped mini, her long blonde hair caught at the back of her neck with a red ribbon. Her shoes were blue, they flashed with November sunshine as she mounted the steps and walked past the green globes flanking the stoop. She walked directly to where Sergeant Dave Murchison sat behind the high muster desk, beamed a radiant smile at him, batted her blue eyes in a semaphore even desk sergeants understand, and sweetly said, “Is Detective Kling in?”
“He is,” Murchison said.
“May I see him, please?”
“Who shall I say is here, whom?” Murchison said.
“Miss Anne Gilroy,” she said, and wheeled away from the desk to study first the Wanted posters on the bulletin board, and then the clock on the wall. She sat at last on the wooden bench opposite the muster desk, took a cigarette from her blue bag, glanced inquiringly at Murchison before lighting it (he nodded permission) and then, to his distraction, crossed her legs and sat calmly smoking while he tried to reach Kling, who was at that moment in the lieutenant’s office.
“Tied up right now,” Murchison said. “Would you mind waiting a moment?”
“Thank you,” Anne Gilroy said, and jiggled her foot. Murchison looked at her legs, wondering what the world was coming to, and wondering whether he should give permission to his twelve-year-old daughter, prepubescent and emerging, to wear such short skirts when she entered her teens, see clear up the whole leg, he thought, and then mopped his brow and plugged into the switchboard as a light flashed. He held a brief conversation, pulled out the cord, looked again to where Anne Gilroy sat with crossed legs and smoke-wreathed blonde hair, and said, “He’ll be right down, Miss.”
“Oh, can’t I go up?”
“He said he’d be down.”
“I was hoping to see a squadroom.”
“Well,” Murchison said, and tilted his head to one side, and thought, What the hell do you hope to see up there except a few bulls working their asses off? The switchboard blinked into life again. He plugged in and took a call from an irate patrolman on Third who said he had phoned in for a meat wagon half an hour ago and there was a lady bleeding on the goddamn sidewalk, when was it gonna get there? Murchison told him to calm down, and the patrolman told Murchison he had never seen so much blood in his life, and the lady was gonna die, and the crowd was getting mean. Murchison said he’d call the hospital again, and then yanked out the cord, and gave himself an outside line.
He was dialing the hospital when Kling came down the iron-runged steps leading from the second floor. Kling looked surprised, even though Murchison had told him who was here. Maybe it was the short skirt that did it. Murchison watched as Kling walked to the bench (“Hello, this is Sergeant Murchison over at the 87th Precinct,” he said into the phone, “where the hell’s that ambulance?”) extended his hand to Anne Gilroy and then sat on the bench beside her. Murchison could not hear them from across the room. (“Well, I got a patrolman screaming at me, and a crowd about to get unmanageable, and a lady about to bleed to death right on the sidewalk there, so how about it?”) Kling now seemed more embarrassed than surprised, he kept nodding his head at Anne Gilroy as she smiled and batted her blue eyes, talking incessantly, her face very close to his as though she were whispering all the secrets of the universe to him. (“Yeah, well how about breaking up the goddamn pinochle game and getting somebody over there?” Murchison shouted into the phone.) Kling nodded again, rose from the bench, and walked toward the muster desk. (“If I get another call from that patrolman, I’m going straight to the Mayor’s office, you got that?” Murchison yelled, and angrily pulled the cord from the switchboard.)
“I’m going out for some coffee,” Kling said.
“Okay,” Murchison said. “When will you be back?”
“Half an hour or so.”
“Right,” Murchison said, and watched as Kling went back to the bench. Anne Gilroy stood up, looped her arm through Kling’s, smiled over her shoulder at Murchison, and clickety-clacked on her high heels across the muster-room floor, tight little ass twitching busily, long blonde hair bouncing on her back. The switchboard was glowing again. Murchison plugged in to find the same patrolman, nearly hysterical this time because the lady had passed away a minute ago, and her brother was screaming to the crowd that this was police negligence, and the patrolman wanted to know what to do. Murchison said whatever he did, he shouldn’t draw his revolver unless it got really threatening, and the patrolman told him it looked really threatening right now, with the crowd beginning to yell and all, and maybe he ought to send some reinforcements over. Murchison said he’d see what he could do and that was when the scream came from the front steps outside the precinct.