Kling accepted the folder. “Who shall I say left it?”
“Cynthia Forrest.”
“Listen, I’m sorry about…”
“Detective Kling,” Cindy said, enunciating every word sharply and distinctly, “I think you are the biggest bastard I’ve ever met in my life.”
Then she turned and walked out of the squadroom.
Kling stared after her a moment, and then shrugged. He carried the manila folder to Carella’s desk, remembered abruptly that the name Cynthia Forrest had been in at least two of the DD reports he’d read, realized immediately that she was the daughter of the dead Anthony Forrest, almost started out of the squadroom in an attempt to catch up with her, said “The hell with it” aloud, and plunked the folder down on Carella’s desktop.
The folder did not contain as much junk as Cindy’s bag had contained, but it did hold a great deal of material on the man who had been her father. Most of the stuff dealt with his days as a student at Ramsey University—some of his old term papers, pictures of him with the football squad, several report cards, a notebook he had kept, and, oh, stuff like that. Carella would not see the contents of the folder until the next morning, because he would be occupied uptown all that day, and would go directly home to dinner with his wife and two kids afterward.
Actually, there wasn’t much in the folder that would have helped him or the case. Except perhaps one thing.
The one thing was a frayed and yellowing theater program.
The front of the program read:
The program sat on top of Carella’s desk, inside the manila folder. The inside of the program listed the past activities of the drama group on the left-hand page, together with a well-wishing half-page ad from the graduating class of June 1940. The back of the program carried a full-page ad for Harry’s Luncheonette, Ice Cream Treats Our Specialty, near the school.
The inside right-hand page of the program contained the following printed information:
CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
FAT JOE Thomas Di Pasquale NICK Andrew Mulligan MAG Margaret Buff OLSON Randolph Norden DRISCOLL Anthony Forrest COCKY David Arthur Cohen IVAN Peter Kelby KATE Helen Struthers FREDA Blanche Ruth Lettiger FIRST ROUGH Salvatore Palumbo SECOND ROUGH Rudy Fenstermacher
That night, while Detective Steve Carella was sitting down to dinner with his wife, Teddy, and the twins, Mark and April, a man named Rudy Fenstermacher was walking from the subway to his home in Majesta.
He never made it, because a .308-caliber bullet hit him right in the head and killed him instantly.
12
Carella started the next morning by yelling.
He was not a yelling man by nature, and he was very fond of Bert Kling, at whom he was directing his tirade. But he was roaring anyway, so loud that the cops downstairs in the locker room could hear him.
“You call yourself a cop?” he shouted. “What kind of a cop…?”
“I didn’t think to look, okay?” Kling said patiently. “She said it was for you, so…”
“I thought you’d been assigned to this case.”
“That’s right,” Kling said patiently.
“Then why didn’t…?”
“How the hell was I supposed to know what was in that folder?”
“She gave it to you, didn’t she?”
“She said it was for you.”
“So you didn’t even look to see what…”
“I felt inside it,” Kling said. “When she first came up.”
“You what?”
“I felt inside it.”
“You felt? Did you say ‘felt’?”
“That’s right.”
“What the hell for?”
“To see if she was carrying a gun.”
“Who?”
“Cynthia Forrest.”
“Carrying a what?”
“A gun.”
“Cynthia Forrest?”
“Yes.”
“What could have possibly given you the idea that Cynthia Forrest…?”
“Because she came up here asking for you, and when I told her you weren’t here, she said she’d wait and then began coming through that gate. And I remembered what happened with Virginia Dodge that time, and I figured maybe this one wanted to put a hole in your head, too. That’s why. Okay?”
“Oh, boy,” Carella said.
“So I felt in the folder, and I looked in her purse, and when I saw she wasn’t heeled, I just took the folder and dumped it on your desk, after I had an argument with her.”
“Without looking inside it.”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, boy,” Carella said.
“Look, I know I’m just a stupid amateur when it comes to the mastermind…”
“Cut it out,” Carella said.
“…of the squad, but I’m new on this case, and I don’t know who half these people are, and I’m not in the habit of opening something that was specifically…”
“Go get him a crying towel, will you, Meyer?”
“…left for someone else. Now, if you want to make a big federal case out of this…”
“A man was killed last night!” Carella shouted.
“I know that, Steve,” Kling said. “But there are a lot of other names on that college program. And while we’re arguing here about what I did or didn’t do, our man might be out taking a potshot at another one of them.” Kling paused. “You want to argue, or shall we hit the phone book and try to locate some of the others?”
“For your information, Junior G-man, Meyer and I got to the squadroom at seven o’clock this morning, after spending all night with the family of Rudy Fenstermacher, who was killed last night because…”
“Steve, get off my back,” Kling said. “I’m not responsible for what happened last night!”
“Maybe you’re not!” Carella shouted.
“No maybes!”
“Okay! I’m trying to tell you we began checking out the names on that program the minute I found it on my desk. There were eleven people in that play, and six of them are already dead. Of the remaining five, we’ve been able to trace only two of the men. The third man isn’t listed in the phone book, and the women are probably married, with new names. We’ve already contacted the university, and they’re going to call back if they have any luck. In the meantime, we’ve called both of the men whose whereabouts are known, and they’re expecting our visit. Now, do you think if I gave you a name and address you could find your way to the right house and manage to ask the man some questions about…?”
“Listen, Steve,” Kling said, “you’re beginning to burn me up, you know that?”
“The man’s name is Thomas Di Pasquale. He played Fat Joe in the O’Neill play. His address is 409 Servatius, right here in Isola. He’s expecting you.”
“What do you want to know from him?” Kling asked.
“I want to know just what happened back in 1940.”
Thomas Di Pasquale lived in a luxurious apartment building on the city’s South Side. When Kling rang his doorbell that morning, he shouted, “Come in, come in, it’s open,” and Kling tried the knob and opened the door onto a wide, thickly carpeted entrance foyer, beyond which was a sunken living room, and a man on a telephone.
The man who had played Fat Joe in a college production years ago was now tall and slim, and somewhat over forty years old. He was wearing a silk dressing gown and had the telephone to his ear as Kling entered the apartment and closed the door and stood waiting in the foyer. Without looking in Kling’s direction, and without stopping his telephone conversation, Di Pasquale gestured to an easy chair opposite him, lit a cigarette, paused for a moment to allow whoever was on the other end to say something, and then said, “Hold it, Harry, hold it right there. That’s where we stop doing business. There’s nothing more to talk about.”