Somehow the mottled stone front of the ancient building seemed to blend with April. The gray assumed a softer tone when juxtaposed to the vibrant blue sky beyond it. The hanging green globes captured something of the blue, and the white numerals “87” on each globe picked up a touch of the clouds that hung fat and lazy in the early spring sky. The similarity ended the moment Carella climbed the low flat steps of the front stoop and passed into the muster room. High-ceilinged, bare except for the muster desk and Sergeant Dave Murchison who sat behind it, the room resembled nothing more than the cheerless, featureless face of an iceberg. Carella nodded to the sergeant and followed the pointing white wooden hand which told him—in case he didn’t know after all these years—where to find theDETECTIVE DIVISION . Where to find it was upstairs. He mounted the iron-runged steps, noticing for the first time what a clatter his shoes made against the metal, turned left into the upstairs corridor, passed the two benches flanking the hallway, and was passing the men’s lavatory when he almost collided with Miscolo who came out of the room zipping up his fly.
“Hey, you’re just the man I want to see,” Miscolo said.
“Uh-oh,” Carella answered.
“Come on, come on, stop making faces. Come into the office a minute, will you?”
The office he referred to was the Clerical Office, labeled with a hand-lettered sign in the corridor, a cubbyhole just outside the slatted, wooden railing which divided the corridor from the detective squadroom. Alf Miscolo was in charge of the Clerical Office, and he ran it with all the hard-fisted, clear-headed mercilessness of an Arabian stablekeeper. His horses, unfortunately, were usually a handful of patrolmen who had pulled twenty-fours, duty as records clerks. But if Miscolo had been given, let us say, a hundred men with whom to run his clerical office, all crime in that fair city would have been eliminated in the space of two days. In conjuction with the police laboratory downtown on High Street, and the Bureau of Criminal Identification, Miscolo’s dossier on criminals would have made it absolutely impossible to commit a crime without risking immediate capture and incarceration. Or so Miscolo fantasied.
The Clerical Office, at the moment, was empty. Its green filing cabinets lined the right-hand wall of the room, facing the two desks opposite it. At the far end of the room, a single huge window, covered on the outside with wire mesh and the grime of a decade, was opened to the fragrance of April.
“What a day, hah?” Miscolo said. He wagged his head in appreciation.
“All right, what’s on your mind?” Carella said.
“Two things.”
“Shoot.”
“First, May Reardon.”
“What about her?”
“Well, you know, Stevie, Mike Reardon worked here for a long time before he got killed. And I liked Mike. I mean, everybody did. You did, too.”
“I did,” Carella admitted.
“And he left May and two kids. That ain’t no picnic, Stevie. So she makes the precinct beds, but what the hell does that give her? Enough to feed two kids? Stevie, this is a tough pull. You got a wife, you got kids. God forbid, suppose something should happen to you, you want Teddy living on what precinct beds get her? Do you?”
“No,” Carella said. “What do you want?”
“I thought we could all chip in. The guys on the squad, and the patrolmen, too. Just a little something more each week to boost that bed money. What do you say, Stevie?”
“Count me in.”
“Will you talk to the other bulls?”
“Now, listen—”
“I’ll talk to the patrolmen. What do you say?”
“I’m a lousy salesman, Miscolo.”
“Aw, this ain’t like selling nothing, Stevie. This is giving that little girl a break. Did you ever see that little girl, Stevie? She’s so goddam Irish, you want to cry.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Irish girls make me want to cry.” He shrugged. He was not a handsome man. His nose was massive, and his eyebrows were bushy, and there was a thickness about his neck which created the impression of head sitting directly on shoulders. He was not a handsome man. And yet, in that moment, as he said what he had to say about Irish girls, as he shrugged boyishly afterwards, there was an enormous appeal to the man. He realized in an instant that Carella was staring at him, and he turned away in embarrassment and said, “What the hell do I know why? Maybe the first girl I laid was Irish—how do I know?”
“Maybe,” Carella said.
“So, will you talk to the other bulls or not?”
“I’ll talk to them,” Carella said.
“Okay. Jesus, to get something done around here, you got to go around pulling teeth.”
“What was the second thing?”
“Huh?”
“The second thing. You said there were two—”
“Yeah, that’s right, I did.” Miscolo frowned. “I can’t think of the other thing right now. It’ll come to me.”
“That’s it, then?”
“Yeah. You just come up from the street?”
Carella nodded.
“How’s it look out there?”
“Same as always,” Carella said. He sat for just a moment longer and then waved at Miscolo and went out of the office into the corridor. He pushed through the gate in the railing, threw his Panama at the hat rack, missed, and was heading to pick it up when Bert Kling stooped for it.
“Thanks,” Carella said. He began taking off his jacket as he walked to Meyer’s desk.
“What was it?” Meyer asked.
“Looks like a homicide,” Carella answered.
“Man or woman?”
“Man.”
“Who?”
“No identification,” Carella said. “He got shot at close range with a shotgun, that’s my guess. All he was wearing was shoes and socks.” Carella shrugged. “I better make out a report. I didn’t see anybody from Homicide there, Meyer. Suppose they’ve given up on us?”
“Who knows? They only like to make noise, anyway. They know the stiff officially belongs to whichever precinct is lucky enough to find it.”
“Well, this one belongs to us,” Carella said, wheeling over a typing cart.
“They doing an autopsy?” Meyer asked.
“Yeah.”
“When do you suppose we’ll have the report?”
“I don’t know. What’s today?”
Meyer shrugged. “Bert! What’s today?”
“April first,” Kling said. “Steve, some dame phoned about—”
“Yeah, but whatday ?” Meyer asked.
“Wednesday,” Kling said. “Steve, this dame called about an hour ago, something about a dry-cleaning store and a counterfeit bill. You know anything about it?”
“Yeah, I’ll call her back later,” Carella said.
“So when do you think we’ll have the report?” Meyer asked again.
“Tomorrow, I suppose. Unless the M.E.’s office got an unusually large number of stiffs today.”
Andy Parker, who was sitting by the water cooler with his feet up on the desk, threw down a movie magazine and said, “You know who I’d like to get in the hay?”