“I don’t suppose you saw anyone with a gun?”
“A gun? No. A what? A gun? No, no.”
“I know you were busy thinking your own thoughts before the man got shot, but afterward, Mrs. Grant? Did you see anyone in one of the windows across the way, or perhaps on the roof of one of the buildings? Did you notice anything unusual?”
“I didn’t look around,” Mrs. Grant said. “I just kept staring at his face.”
“Did the man say anything to you before he fell to the sidewalk?”
“Not a word.”
“After he fell?”
“Nothing.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Grant,” Carella said. He smiled briefly but pleasantly and then closed his notebook.
“Is that all?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“But…” Mrs. Grant seemed disappointed. She gave a slight shrug.
“Yes, Mrs. Grant?”
“Well…won’t I have to come to the trial or anything?”
“I don’t think so, Mrs. Grant. Thank you very much.”
“Well…all right,” Mrs. Grant said, but she kept watching him in disappointment as he walked away from her and back to the body. The police photographer was dancing his intricate little jig around the corpse, snapping a picture, ejecting a flashbulb, inserting another flashbulb, and then twisting his body and bending his knees to get a shot from another angle. The two interns stood near the ambulance, casually smoking and chatting about an emergency tracheotomy one had performed the day before. Not three feet away from them, talking to a patrolman, stood detectives Monoghan and Monroe, who had been sent over as a matter of form from Homicide North. Carella watched the photographer for a moment, and then walked over to the two Homicide dicks.
“Well, well,” he said, “to what do we owe the honor?”
Monoghan, wearing a black topcoat and a black derby, looking like a Prohibition cop of the twenties, turned, looked at Carella, and then said to Monroe, “Why, it’s Carella of the Eight-Seven,” as though discovering him in great surprise.
“Upon my soul, I believe it is,” Monroe said, turning away from the patrolman. He, too, wore a black topcoat. A gray fedora was pushed onto the back of his head. He had a nervous tic near one eye that seemed to jerk magically whenever his partner spoke, as though a secret recording mechanism were at work behind his fleshy features.
“I hope we didn’t break in on your dinner or anything,” Carella said.
“What I like about the cops of the 87th,” Monoghan said while Monroe ticked, “is that they are always so concerned about their colleagues in the department.”
“Also, they are very funny,” Monroe observed.
“I am always amazed,” Monoghan said, putting his hands in his coat pockets, with the thumbs sticking out, the way he had seen it done by Sydney Greenstreet in a movie once, “by their concern and their good humor.”
“I am always amazed by it, too,” Monroe said.
“Who’s the stiff?” Monoghan asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Carella replied. “I’m waiting for the photographer to get finished there.”
“He takes a good picture,” Monroe said.
“He does portrait work on the side, I hear,” Monoghan said.
“You know what some of these guys are doing now?” Monroe asked.
“Which guys?” Monoghan said.
“The photographers. The ones they send out on homicides.”
“No. What are they doing?”
“They’re using these Polaroid cameras to take their pictures.”
“Yeah? What’s their hurry?”
“It ain’t that they’re in a hurry,” Monroe said, “it’s just that when you’re working with a stiff, like if the picture don’t turn out, you can’t call him back for another sitting, you know? By that time, the morgue’s got him all cut up. So this way, the photographers can see what they got right off.”
“Boy, what they won’t think of next, huh?” Monoghan said, properly awed. “So what’s new, Carella? How’s the skipper? How’re the boys?”
“Everybody’s fine,” Carella said.
“You working on anything interesting?”
“This ought to be an interesting one,” Carella said.
“Yeah, snipers are always interesting,” Monoghan agreed.
“We had a sniper once,” Monroe said, “when I was just made detective, working out of the Three-Nine. He used to shoot only old ladies. That was his specialty, little old ladies. He used to pick them off with a .45. He was a damn good shot, too. You remember Mickey Dunhill?”
“Yeah, I remember him,” Monoghan said.
“You remember Mickey Dunhill?” Monroe asked Carella.
“No. Who’s Mickey Dunhill?”
“Detective/first working out of the Three-Nine. Little tiny guy, he could knock you flat on your ass, strong as an ox. We dressed him up like a little old lady. That’s how we got the guy. He took a shot at Dunhill, and Dunhill pulled up his skirts and chased him up the roof and nearly beat him to death.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Monoghan said.
“We get the guy downtown, you know? The sniper? We put him in a chair, we try to find out how come he’s killing little old ladies. We figure maybe he’s got an Oedipus thing, you know? But…”
“A what?” Monoghan asked.
“Oedipus,” Monroe said. “He was this Greek king. He slept with his old lady.”
“That’s against the law,” Monoghan said.
“I know. Anyway, we figured maybe this sniper was nuts, you know? So we kept asking him how come little old ladies? Why don’t he pick on little old men? Or anybody, for that matter? How come he only plugs sweet little old ladies?”
“How come?” Monoghan asked.
Monroe shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell us.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wouldn’t tell us.”
“So what’s the point of your story?”
“What do you mean, what’s the point? Here was a guy, he used to go around shooting little old ladies!” Monroe said indignantly.
“Yeah? So?”
“So? So, what do you mean, what’s the point? That’s the point.”
“What about the other guy?”
“What guy?”
“The Greek guy,” Monoghan said impatiently.
“What Greek guy?”
“The king, the king. Didn’t you say there was a Greek king?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, he had nothing to do with it,” Monroe said.
“You shoulda looked him up, anyway,” Monoghan insisted. “You never know.”
“How could we look him up? He was legendary.”
“He was what?” Monoghan asked.
“Legendary. Legendary.”
Monoghan nodded knowingly. “Well, that could make a difference,” he said. “Still, it always pays to cover all the angles.”
“I think the photographer’s through,” Carella said.
“You need us?” Monroe asked.
“I don’t think so. I’ll send you a copy of the report.”
“You know what you should do?” Monroe said.
“What?”
“Dress up that big redhead you got up there, what’s his name?”
“Cotton Hawes?”
“Yeah, him. Dress him up like a little old lady. Maybe your sniper’ll take a crack at him.”
“He seems to favor middle-aged men,” Carella said.
Monoghan turned to look at the corpse. “He can’t be more than forty,” he said, slightly miffed. “Since when is forty middle-aged?”
“Mature, I meant,” Carella said.
“Yeah, that’s better,” Monoghan answered. “Send us two copies, we got a new regulation.”
“Come on, have a heart,” Carella said.
“Do I make the regulations?”
“You mean you don’t?” Carella said, looking surprised.