THEMATTHEWHOPENOVELS
Goldilocks(1978)Rumpelstiltskin (1981)Beauty & the Beast (1982)Jack & the Beanstalk (1984)Snow White & Rose Red (1985)Cinderella (1986)Puss in Boots (1987)The House That Jack Built (1988)Three Blind Mice (1990)Mary, Mary (1993)There Was a Little Girl (1994)Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear (1996)The Last Best Hope (1998)
OTHERNOVELS
The Sentries(1965)Where There’s Smoke •Doors (1975)Guns (1976)Another Part of the City (1986)Downtown (1991)Driving Lessons (2000)Candyland * (2001)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This is for my father-in-law
Harry Melnick—
who inspired it
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all
fictitious. Only the police routine is based
on established investigatory technique.
1.
SHE CAME IN like a lady, that April.
The poet may have been right, but there really wasn’t a trace of cruelty about her this year. She was a delicate thing who walked into the city with the wide-eyed innocence of a maiden, and you wanted to hold her in your arms because she seemed alone and frightened in this geometric maze of strangers, intimidated by the streets and the buildings, shyly touching you with the pale-gray eyes of a lady who’d materialized somehow from the cold marrow of March.
She wandered mist-shrouded through the city, a city that had become suddenly green in exuberant welcome. She wandered alone, reaching into people the way she always does, but not with cruelty. She touched wellsprings deep inside, so that people for a little while, sensing her approach, feeling her come close again, turned a soft vulnerable pulsing interior to her, turned it outward to face the harsh angles of the city’s streets and buildings, held out tenderness to be touched by tenderness, but only for a little while.
And for that little while, April would linger on the walks of Grover Park, linger like white mist on a mountain meadow, linger on the paths and in the budding trees, spreading a delicate perfume on the air. And along the lake and near the statue of Daniel Webster below Twelfth Street, the cornelian cherry shrubs would burst into early bloom. And further west, uptown, facing Grover Avenue and the building which housed the men of the 87th Precinct, the bright yellow blossoms of forsythias would spread along the park’s retaining wall in golden-banked fury while the Japanese quince waited for a warmer spring, waited for April’s true and warm and rare and lovely smile.
For Detective Meyer Meyer, April was a Gentile.
Sue him; she was a Gentile. Perhaps for Detective Steve Carella April was a Jewess.
Which is to say that, for both of them, April was a strange and exotic creature, tempting, a bit unreal, warm, seductive, shrouded with mystery. She crossed the avenue from Grover Park with the delicate step of a lady racing across a field in yellow taffeta, and she entered the squadroom in her insinuating perfume and rustling petticoats, and she turned the minds of men to mush.