“Sure, but you’re not likely to find much on his desk.”
“Perhaps in it.”
“Nor in it, neither. Andy Leyden’s office was pretty much his hat. He was a traveling man.”
As Witters had promised, there was nothing they could use in Andrew Leyden’s desk. His office was at the far end of the corridor, a tiny cubicle painted beige and set between the Mailing Room and the Records Office. A large window faced the street, an air conditioner in its lower half. A brown-chalk drawing of a woman’s head, a Picasso print, was framed and hanging on the wall opposite the desk. A cartoon clipped from a magazine was pinned to a bulletin board near the light switch. It showed a woman talking to a salesman on her doorstep, and the caption was, “Don’t you dare try to sell brushes to me, Harry. I’m your wife!” The word “brushes” had a line drawn through it, and over it someone had lettered in the word “tractors.” In the same handwriting, lettered in over the name “Harry,” someone had written “Andrew.”
Leyden’s desk was made of metal, painted green, completely utilitarian and hardly aesthetic. A picture of his wife was on the left-hand corner of the desk, alongside the telephone. It had been taken prior to a wedding or a ball, and Rose Leyden was wearing a low-cut evening gown. A beauty spot clearly showed just above her left breast, an inch or so higher than the top of her gown. She was smiling stiffly at the photographer. A blotter was the only other thing on the desk. Carella automatically checked it for any mirror writing that might have been left on it, but the blotter seemed new, with only a single inkstain in one corner. The top drawer of the desk contained paper clips and a memo pad and several pencils and an eraser. An AT&M order form was at the back of the drawer. The three side drawers of the desk contained, in sequence: telephone directories for Isola, Calm’s Point, and Riverhead; four lined yellow composition pads; a pair of scuffed loafers; a paperback copy of Hawaii; a calendar, the top leaf of which still read September 3; and a half-full box of chocolates. That was it. They thanked Mr. Witters for his time and his courtesy and went down the corridor again toward the elevators. Anne Gilroy looked up as they approached her desk.
“In case I think of anything,” she said to Kling, “how can I reach you?”
“Are you liable to think of anything?” Carella asked.
“Who knows?” Anne said, and smiled at Kling.
“Here’s my card,” Kling said, and fished it from his wallet.
“Bertram,” she said, reading the card. “I don’t know a single person in the entire world named Bertram.”
“Well, now you do,” Carella said.
“Yes,” she said, still looking at Kling. “Now I do.”
When they got back to the squadroom, Andy Parker told them the FBI had sent a teletyped report on the fingerprints dispatched to them last Saturday. They had nothing on Rose or Andrew Leyden, and they had also come up negative on the wild prints. This meant that the killer, whoever he was, had no police record, nor had he ever served in the armed forces of the United States. It also meant, for whatever such information was worth at the moment, that the killer had probably never held a government job either, since most government agencies required fingerprints of their employees. By twelve noon that Monday, it looked as though the case was not going to be such a pushover.
The shotgun found in the dead man’s hands had been a 12-gauge pump type fitted with a barrel for 2 ¾-inch shells. Its capacity was six shells. Two of those had been blasted into the face of Rose Leyden, and another two into the face of her husband. A spent cartridge case, unejected, had been found in the receiver of the gun. Two unfired shells were below, waiting to be pumped into the chamber. The shells were 12-gauge Remington Express with Number 2 shot, the largest shot available. Two such loads fired into anyone’s face at close range were entirely capable of causing complete destruction. The police laboratory had identified the weapon for Carella and also provided him with a manufacturer’s serial number. At ten minutes after 12:00 that Monday, he called the manufacturer’s representative in the city, gave him the serial number of the gun, and asked if he could tell him which retail outlet had sold it. The man on the phone asked him to wait a moment, and then came back to the phone and said he would have to look it up, and could he call Carella back? Carella gave him the number at the squadroom, and then sent out for a Western on a hard roll. He had finished the sandwich and was drinking his second cup of coffee when the telephone rang.
“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
“Mr. Carella, this is Fred Thiessen.”
“Hello, Mr. Thiessen,” Carella said. “Did you come up with anything?”
“Yes, I have. Let me just check that serial number again, may I? I don’t want to make any mistakes on this.”
“It was A-37426,” Carella said.
“A-37426,” Thiessen said, “Yes, that’s what I’ve got. Well, I checked our invoices for the month of August, which was when that series must have gone out to retailers. We’re already shipping the 376s, in this area at least, so I figured this must have been August or so.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. We shipped that gun — it’s our 833K, by the way — together with a .410 gauge single-shot, and two bolt-action repeaters. This was on August fourth.”
“To whom did you ship it?”
“Oh, yes, we also shipped our new 20-gauge model, with the selective choke tube, on the same date.”
“To whom, Mr. Thiessen?”
“The shipment went to Paramount Sporting Goods.”
“In Isola?”
“No, sir. In Newfield. Across the river, in the next state.”
“Would you have the address handy?”
“Yes, it’s 1147 Barter.”
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Thiessen, you’ve been very helpful.”
“Was one of our guns used in a crime?”
“I’m afraid so,” Carella said.
“We’d appreciate it if our company name wasn’t mentioned to the press.”
“We don’t generally release that kind of information anyway, Mr. Thiessen.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Carella said again, and hung up.
The fact that the shotgun had been purchased in the town of Newfield, across the river, seemed to indicate that the murderer knew at least something about gun laws. For whereas these laws varied widely throughout the US of A, making it possible for hunters (or sometimes murderers) to buy weapons either here or there with relative ease, the law in the city for which Carella and Kling worked was quite stringent. It required that anyone wishing to possess or purchase a rifle or a shotgun needed a permit, and it specifically denied such permit to:
(1) Anyone under the age of eighteen, or
(2) Anyone who had been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor, or
(3) Anyone who had been confined to a hospital for mental illness, alcoholism, or drug addiction unless now declared sound by a specialist in psychiatric medicine, or
(4) Anyone who suffered from any physical defect that would make it unsafe for him to handle such weapons, or
(5) Anyone who was a mental defective or a habitual drunkard or a narcotics addict, or
(6) Anyone who had been dishonorably discharged from the military service by reason of an action found constituting a felony or a misdemeanor.
Moreover, application for a permit had to be accompanied by two photographs taken within thirty days prior to filing, and fingerprinting of the applicant was mandatory.
It was a tough law, and a good law.
In the town of Newfield, however, across the river, you could buy a rifle or a shotgun over the counter of any store selling them, so long as you had the money necessary to complete this act of commerce. If you chose to carry the weapon back across the river and into the city, the law required that application for a permit be made within forty-eight hours and that the gun be left at your resident precinct until you could produce the proper permit and registration certificate. But if you had bought a shotgun in Newfield and intended to shoot two people in the face, it is doubtful that you would even consider registering the gun once you got back to the city.