“È un più grosso peccato contro Dio di uccidere,” Carella answered.
“What’s she saying?” Meyer asked.
“She doesn’t want an autopsy.”
“Tell her we don’t need her permission.”
“How’s that going to help? She’s out of her mind with grief.” He turned back to the woman. “Signora,” he said, “è necessario individuare il tipo di pallottola che l’ho uccise. La palla è ancora dentro, non comprende? Doddiamo sapere che tipo.”
“Si, si, capisco.”
“È per questo che dobbiamo fare un’autopsia. Comprende? Così potremo trovare l’assassino.”
“Si, si capisco.”
“La prego, signora. Provi.” He patted her on the shoulder, and then turned to the son, Richard. Richard was perhaps thirty years old, a strapping man with broad shoulders and a dancer’s narrow waist. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Palumbo, is that all right?”
“You have to excuse my mother,” Palumbo said. “She doesn’t speak English too well.”
“That’s all right,” Carella said.
“My father spoke pretty good English, though not when he first came here. He really worked at it. But my mother…” Richard shook his head. “I guess she always felt America was a temporary thing, a stop along the way. I think she always planned to go back to Naples, you know? But not my father. This was it. For him, this was it. He’d really found the place. So he learned the language. He really learned it pretty good. A little accent, but not too noticeable. He was quite a guy.”
Richard said all this looking at a point somewhere above Carella’s shoulders, not looking into Carella’s eyes or even his face. He delivered the words as though he were saying a prayer over Palumbo’s open grave. There were no tears in his eyes, but his face was white, and he kept focusing on that imaginary point somewhere above Carella’s shoulder, staring.
“He worked hard all his life,” Richard said. “When we first came to this country, I was just a little kid. That was in 1938, that was a long time ago. I was eight years old. My brother was only three. We didn’t have nothing to eat then, you know? My father worked like a horse on the docks. He was a skinny little guy then, you shoulda seen him. Then he got all these muscles from lifting all that heavy stuff, you know? He was quite a guy, my father.” He gestured toward the small framed picture of Palumbo where it stood on the living room mantelpiece. “He made all this himself, you know—the house, the store. From nothing. Saved up his pennies, learned English, got himself a pushcart at first with the money he saved from the docks. Just like when he was in Naples, he used to push that damn pushcart all over the city, he used to be exhausted when he got home at night. I remember he used to yell at me, and once he even slapped me, not because he was sore at me, but only because he was so damn tired. But he made it, huh? He got his own store, didn’t he? He had a good business, my father. He was a real good man.”
Carella looked at Meyer, and neither said a word.
“So somebody kills him,” Richard said. “Somebody shoots him from up there on the train station.” He paused. “What did he do to anybody? He never hurt anybody in his entire life. Only once did he ever slap even me, his own son, and that was because he was so tired, not because he was sore, he never hit anybody in anger, he never hit anybody at all. So he’s dead.”
Richard gave a slight shrug, and his hands moved in a futile, bewildered gesture.
“How do you figure it? I don’t know. How do you make any sense out of it? He worked all his damn life to have his store, to take care of his family, and then somebody just shoots him, like as if he was…nothing. That’s my father that guy shot, don’t he know that? That’s my father they took away in the ambulance. For Christ’s sake, don’t he realize that, the guy who shot him? Don’t he realize this is my father who’s dead now?”
Tears were welling into his eyes. He kept staring at the spot above Carella’s shoulder.
“Ain’t he got a father, that guy? How could he just…just shoot him like that, how could he make himself pull the trigger? This is a man who was standing down there, a man, my father, for Christ’s sake! Don’t he know what he done? Don’t he know this man is never gonna go to his store again, he’s never gonna argue with the customers, he’s never gonna laugh or nothing? How could he do that, will you tell me?”
Richard paused. His voice lowered. “I didn’t even see him today. He left the house before I got up this morning. My wife and I, we live right upstairs. Every morning I usually meet him, we leave about the same time to go to work. I work in an aircraft-parts factory on Two Thirty-third. But this morning, I had a little virus, I was running a small fever, my wife said stay in bed, so she called in sick. And I didn’t get to see my father. Not even to say, ‘Hello, Pop, how’s it going?’ So today, somebody kills him. The day I didn’t see him.”
“Have you got any idea who might have done this?” Carella asked.
“No.”
“Has anyone been threatening your father? Had he received any notes or phone calls, or…?”
“No.”
“Any trouble with any of the businessmen along the avenue?”
“None.” Richard shook his head again. “Everybody liked him. This don’t make sense. Everybody liked him.” He rubbed at his nose with his forefinger, sniffed, and said again, “I didn’t even see him today. Not even to say hello.”
9
The next morning, Wednesday, May 2, Steve Carella went in to see Detective Lieutenant Byrnes. He told the lieutenant that the case was taking some unexpected twists, that he and Meyer thought they’d had at least something to go on, but that they weren’t quite so sure of that anymore, and that there was a strong possibility the killer was a nut. In view of the circumstances, Carella told the lieutenant, he would like additional help from whomever Byrnes could spare on the squad, and he would also like to request that Byrnes put in for help from the other squads in the city, since the killer seemed to be moving from place to place, and since legwork alone was taking up a considerable amount of time that could just possibly go into deduction, if there was anything to deduce, which there didn’t seem to be at the moment.
Byrnes listened to everything Carella had to say, and told him he would do everything he could as soon as he had a chance to look over his duty schedules and to call the Chief of Detectives downtown at headquarters. But Carella had to wait until much later that day before he got the help he requested. And then, unexpectedly, the help came from the District Attorney’s office.
Andrew Mulligan was an assistant district attorney who wanted to be governor of the state one day, and after that—now that Kennedy had broken the ground for Catholics—he figured it might be nice to be president. His office was downtown on High Street adjacent to the Criminal Courts Building, just across the street from Police Headquarters. Byrnes had placed his call to the Chief of Detectives at precisely 11:15 A.M., but Mulligan didn’t know that, since he’d been in court at the time. In fact, Mulligan had no notion that the men of the 87th Squad were working on four possibly related murders, nor did he have any idea that he would soon be helping them with the case. At the moment, he was working with the DA himself on a case involving income-tax evasion. Mulligan didn’t know that the DA himself wanted to be governor of the state, too, but even if he had known, it wouldn’t have bothered him. The particular case they were trying together involved a very big-shot racketeer and was getting a lot of headlines in the local press. Mulligan liked headlines. It annoyed him that there was a jazz musician named Gerry Mulligan, who wasn’t even a relation. He felt that when anyone mentioned the name Mulligan, or whenever the name Mulligan appeared in print, it should instantly bring to mind the image of a fighting assistant district attorney, and not some crummy bongo drummer, or whatever this other Mulligan was.