“There he goes again. See what I mean? You could wet your pants laughing. Send the two copies, Carella. See who gets the last laugh.”
“You think maybe the Greek guy did it?” Carella asked.
“What Greek guy?”
“I don’t know, the one Monroe was talking about.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Monoghan said. “A guy who’d sleep with his own mother is capable of anything.”
Smiling, Carella walked to where the photographer was packing his equipment. “You all finished here?” he asked.
“Be my guest,” the photographer said.
“I’ll want some of those pictures.”
“Sure. What precinct is this, anyway?”
“The Eight-Seven.”
“Right,” the photographer said. “And your name?”
“Carella. Steve Carella.”
“You’ll have them tomorrow.” He glanced at the sedan that pulled to the curb and then grinned and said, “Uh-oh.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The lab boys. Now you’ll have to wait till they get through.”
“All I want to do is find out who the hell the guy is,” Carella said, and then he turned toward the two technicians who stepped out of the automobile.
2
He had found out who the hell the guy was by going through his wallet, and now the hard part lay ahead.
The guy was Anthony Forrest, and his driver’s license gave his address as 301 Morrison Drive, his height as five feet eight inches, and his eyes as blue. He carried six credit cards, all made out to Anthony Forrest: the Diner’s Club, American Express, Carte Blanche, the Gulf Oil Corporation, the Mobil Oil Company, and a card for one of the men’s department stores in the city. He also carried a business card that repeated his name, Anthony Forrest, and gave the name of his firm, Indian Exports, Inc., and the address, 580 Culver Avenue, which happened to be the address of the building in front of which he’d been shot and killed. The business card also gave him a title, which was vice president, and a phone number for the company, Frederick 7-4100. There were assorted other cards and scraps of paper in his wallet, and a $5 bill folded into his driver’s license, apparently there as insurance against traffic tickets. There were $70 in cash in the wallet, three twenties, the five, and five singles.
Carella found the photographs in the gatefold.
The woman was perhaps thirty-five years old, with bright youthful eyes and light hair. She smiled happily up at him through the celluloid case. There were pictures of three different children, all with the woman’s light hair and light eyes, two boys and a girl. The boys were wearing Cub Scout uniforms. One seemed to be slightly older than the other, but neither one was more than ten or eleven. The girl was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. The picture of her had been taken at a beach someplace. She was holding a large, striped beach ball and grinning over its top. Forrest himself stood behind her, grinning like a teenager, holding up two fingers behind her head so that they resembled horns.
Carella sighed and closed the wallet.
There is a quaint police regulation that requires corpses to be identified, and it is usually a blood relative who makes the positive identification, thereby enabling the police to know they are looking for the murderer of John Smith rather than the murderer of John Doe. The pictures in the wallet seemed to indicate that Forrest had a wife and three children, and it now remained for somebody to go to his home, wait for his door to open, face that wife and those children, and tell them that Anthony Forrest, husband, father, loved one, was stone cold dead.
The somebody was Steve Carella.
The girl who opened the door at 301 Morrison was the same girl Carella had seen grinning over the top of the beach ball in the photograph. The picture, though, had obviously been taken some years before, because the girl seemed to be at least nineteen or twenty. Her hair didn’t seem as blonde, either, but there was the same lively inquiry in her blue eyes, and she smiled at Carella in polite confusion and said, “Yes? May I help you?”
“Miss Forrest?” Carella asked.
“Yes?” she said, more confused now, the blonde eyebrows rising ever so slightly on her forehead.
“I’m Detective Carella of the 87th Precinct,” Carella said. He paused, obligingly showed his shield and his ID card, and then cleared his throat. The girl waited. “May I speak to your mother, please?”
“She’s not in,” the girl said.
“Do you know where I can reach her?”
“She went to meet my father for dinner,” the girl said. “Why?”
“Oh,” Carella said, and suddenly the girl got the message. Up to that moment she had been only puzzled by his appearance, but something in the way he said the word “Oh” triggered alarm in her, and her eyes opened wide, and she took a short, quick step toward him and said, “What is it?”
“May I come in, please?”
“Yes, certainly,” the girl said, but they did not move farther into the house than the entrance foyer. “What is it?” she said. “What happened?”
“Miss…” Carella said, and he hesitated, wondering if he should tell her, wondering if she was old enough to hear this, and yet realizing he had to locate her mother, had to inform someone.
“Do you know where your mother went? Where she was going to meet him?”
“Yes, Schrafft’s. I don’t know if they were going to have dinner there, but that’s where they were meeting. Look, will you please tell me what this is about?”
Carella looked at her for what seemed like a very long time. Then, very gently, he said, “Miss, your father is dead.”
The girl backed away from him. She stared at him a moment, and then smiled curiously, and then the smile dropped from her mouth, and she shook her head once, briefly, and said, “No.”
“I’m sorry, miss.”
“There must be some mistake. He was meeting my mother for—”
“I don’t think there’s any mistake, miss.”
“Well…well…how do you know? I mean…for God’s sake, what happened?”
“He was shot.”
“My father?” she asked incredulously. She shook her head again. “Shot? Are you joking or something?”
“I’m sorry, miss, I’m not joking. I’d like to contact your mother. May I use your phone?”
“Look…look…what you said is…is impossible, don’t you see? My father’s name is Anthony Forrest. Now, I’m sure you’ve…”
Carella touched her arm gently. “Miss,” he said, “the man was carrying identification. We’re reasonably certain he was your father.”
“What sort of identification?”
“A wallet.”
“Then someone must have stolen it from him,” the girl said. “That happens all the time, you know. And the man who got shot was undoubtedly carrying my father’s stolen wallet, so naturally you assumed…”
“Who is it, Cindy?” a boy’s voice yelled from somewhere upstairs.
“It’s nothing, Jeff. It’s all right,” she answered.
“I’d like to call your mother,” Carella said.
“Why? So you can alarm her unnecessarily, too?”
Carella did not answer. He stared at the girl in silence. Tears were gathering behind her eyes; he could see them gathering, but she held on tightly for several moments and then said, “Go ahead, call. But…you better be right, you hear me? That man better be my father. Because…you…you just better not be making any mistake.” The tears were standing in her eyes now, an opaque film over the clear blue. “The phone’s in here.” she said. As he followed her into the living room, she added, “I’m sure he’s not my father.” A small laugh caught in her throat. “What would my father be doing getting…getting shot?”