"No. Let me see your badge, too," she said.
Kling fished out a small leather holder, and flashed the gold and blue-enameled shield.
"Excuse me," she said, and went directly to the telephone on the kitchen wall. She dialed a number, waited, listening, and then said, "Mr Alexander, please. Cynthia Keating." She waited again. "Todd," she said, "the police are here. What's your advice?" She listened again, nodded, kept listening, finally said, "Thanks, Todd, talk to you," and hung up. "Gentlemen," she said, "unless you have a warrant for my arrest, my attorney suggests you take a walk."
There was something very comforting about being alone at last in the dead girl's apartment. First of all, the silence. This city, the one thing you could never find anyplace was peace and quiet. There were always sirens going, day and night, police or ambulance, and there were car horns honking, mostly taxicabs, foreigners from India or Pakistan leaning on their horns day and night because they were remembering how fast their camels used to race across the desert sands where there were no traffic lights. Noisiest damn city in the entire universe, this city. Ollie much preferred the silence here in the dead girl's apartment.
He sometimes felt if he hung around a dead person's apartment long enough, he would pick up the vibrations of the killer. Get into his or her skin somehow. He had read a story once—he hated reading—where the theory was the image of a person's murderer would be left on the person's eyeballs, the retina, whatever. Total bullshit. But the silence in a victim's apartment was almost palpable, and he gave real credence to the notion that if he stood there long enough, in the silence, the vibrations of the killer would seep into his bones, though to tell the truth this had never happened to him. Nonetheless, he stood stock still at the foot of the dead girl's bed now, imagining her as he'd first seen her on the kitchen floor, knife in her chest, trying to feel what the killer had felt while he was stabbing her, trying to get into his skin. Nothing happened. Ollie sighed, farted, and began his solitary search of Althea Cleary's apartment.
What he hoped he definitely would not find was her parents' names. He did not want to have to call them personally and tell them their daughter was dead. He wasn't good at such stuff. To Ollie, when a person was dead he was dead, and you didn't go around wringing your hands or tearing out your hair. He couldn't think of
a single dead person he missed, including his own mothe and father. He guessed if his sister Isabelle died, he woul miss her a little, but not enough to be the one who got u and said some kind words about her at the funeral servic because to tell the truth he couldn't think of a single kini thing he might care to say about her, dead or alive. Lik most living people, Isabelle Weeks was a pain in the ass She once told him he was a bigot. He told her to go fuel herself, girlfriend.
He had already looked through the dead girl's addres book and appointment calendar, but he hadn't found an; listings for anybody named Cleary. There were a fev names for people in Montana, which wasn't either Ohi( or Idaho or Iowa as the super had guessed, but thes< weren't Clearys, and he didn't plan on calling somebody in Montana just to find out if they were related to ; dead black girl he didn't want to tell them about in th( first place. Her appointment calendar wasn't much help either. She probably was new here in the city, whicl maybe explained why she had cappuccino all the time with the lady upstairs who taught piano. Ollie woulc have to give her a call. Night and Day, he thought And maybe Satisfaction, which was one of his favorite songs, too.
He went to the girl's dresser now, and opened the top drawer, looking for he didn't know what, anything thai would tell him something about either her or whoever had been with her on the night she died. There were cops who went by the book, canvassed the neighborhood first, asked Leroy and Luis, Carmen and Clarisse did they see anybody going in or out of the apartment, but up here in Zimbabwe West, nobody ever saw nothing if you were a cop. Anyway, he preferred getting to know the vie first, and then getting to know whoever knew her. Besides, Ollie liked dead people much better than he did most living ones. Dead people didn't
give you any trouble. You went into a dead person's apartment, you didn't have to worry about farting or belching. Also, if the vie was a girl, you could handle her panties or panty hose—like he was doing now— without anybody thinking you were some kind of pervert. Ollie sniffed the crotch of a pair of red panties, which was actually good police work because it would tell him was the girl a clean person or somebody who just dropped panties she had worn right back in the drawer without rinsing them out. They smelled fresh and clean.
Being in her apartment, sniffing her panties, going through the rest of her underwear, and her sweaters and her blouses and her high-heeled shoes in the closet, and her coats and dresses, one of them a blue Monica Lewinsky dress, going through all her personal belongings, trying to find something, wondering what kind of person could have stabbed the girl it looked like half a dozen times and then left a fuckin bread knife sticking out of her chest, opening her handbag and rummaging through the personal girl things in it, he felt both privileged and inviolate, like an invisible burglar.
Carl Blaney was weighing a liver when Ollie got downtown at four o'clock that Wednesday afternoon. It was still raining, though not as hard as it had been earlier. The morgue and the rain outside both had the same stainless steel hue. He watched as Blaney transferred the liver from the scale to a stainless steel pan. Personally, Ollie found body parts disgusting.
"Is that hers?" he asked.
"Whose?" Blaney said.
"The vic's."
"That's all we've got here is vies."
"Althea Cleary. The little colored girl got stabbed." "Oh, that one."
"What do you do here, you just go from one liver to another?"
"Yep, that's all we do here," Blaney said dryly. "So what've you got for me?" Ollie asked.
There was nothing Meyer liked better than to irritate Fat Ollie Weeks. The man was calling to talk to Carella, but Carella was down the hall. Meyer could not resist the temptation.
"Do you plan to sue this guy?" he asked.
"What guy is that?" Ollie asked.
He had never sued anybody in his entire life. He figured the lawyers of the world were rich enough.
"This guy who wrote this book with a lot of police stuff in it."
"What guy?" Ollie asked again.
"This Irishman who wrote a book. You're famous now, Ollie."
"The fuck is that supposed to mean?" Ollie said.
"On the other hand, it does say in the front of the book that the names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously."
"Wonderful," Ollie said. "Tell Steve I called, okay? I got to see him about something."
"'Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons is entirely coincidental,'" Meyer quoted. "Is what it says. So I guess it is just a coincidence."
"What is just a coincidence?" Ollie asked.
"His name being so similar to yours and all," Meyer explained.
"Whose name?"
"This guy."
"What guy?" Ollie asked for the third fuckin time.
"This guy in this police novel written by this Irish journalist."
"Okay, I'll bite," Ollie said.
"Fat Ollie Watts," Meyer said, drawing the name out grandly. "Not that anyone ever calls you Fat Ollie," he added at once.
"They better not" Ollie said. "What do you mean, Fat Ollie Watts?"
"Is the name of a character in this book."
"A character! Fat Ollie Watts?'
"Yeah. But he's just a minor character."
"A minor character?"
"Yeah, some kind of cheap thief."
"Some kind of cheap thief!"