“I’m still listening.”
“Comes to the handwriting itself, and there’s a lot of crap here you don’t have to know about unless you come up with a sample for comparison. There’s only one thing you do have to know.”
“What’s that?”
“Whoever sent this over asked us to run a handwriting comparison against the signature of one Martin Sokolin on whom we have a record at the IB. We did that. And one thing’s for sure.”
“And what’s that?”
“Martin Sokolin didn’t write that love note.”
The three detectives stood over the body of Joseph Birnbaum. There was no pain, no joy, no sorrow on their faces. Impassively, they stared at death and whatever they felt was rigidly concealed behind the masks they wore for society.
Carella was the first to kneel.
“Shot him in the back,” he said. “Bullet probably passed through to the heart. Killed him instantly.”
“That’s my guess,” Hawes said, nodding.
“How come we didn’t hear the shot?” Kling asked.
“All those champagne bottles going off. This is quite a distance from the house. The shot probably sounded like just another cork going off. Take a look around, will you, Bert? See if you can find the spent cartridge.”
Kling began thrashing through the bushes. Carella turned to Jonesy where he stood with Christine. His face was a pasty white. His hands, though he tried to control them, were trembling at his sides.
“Pull yourself together,” Carella said harshly. “You can help us, but not the way you are now.”
“I... I... I can’t help it,” Jonesy said. “I... I feel like I’m going to collapse. That’s why... why I sent Christine for you.”
“Is that why?” Hawes asked.
“I... I knew I couldn’t make it myself.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Carella said. “If you’d have erupted onto that lawn, you’d have busted up that wedding as sure as—”
“What were you doing back here, anyway?” Hawes said, and he looked at Christine angrily.
“We were taking a walk,” Jonesy said.
“Why here?”
“Why not?”
“Answer my question, damnit!” Hawes shouted. “That man there is dead, and you’re the one who found the body, and I’d like to know just what the hell brought you back here? Coincidence?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What were you doing here?”
“Walking with Christine.”
“Cotton, we just—”
“I’ll get to you, Christine,” Hawes said. “Why’d you choose this path for a walk, Jones? So that you’d have a witness when you discovered the body?”
“What?”
“You heard me!”
“That’s... that’s prep — that’s preposterous!”
“Is it? Then why’d you come back here?”
“So I could kiss Christine,” Jonesy blurted.
“And did you?” Hawes said venomously.
“Cotton—”
“Keep out of this, Christine. Did you kiss her?”
“What’s this got to do with Birnbaum? What business is it of yours whether or not I—”
“When did you see the body?” Carella interrupted, annoyed because Hawes was dragging his interrogation down into the muck of a private and not a police matter.
“We were standing here,” Jonesy said. “And I happened to see it.”
“You were just standing here?” Carella asked.
“I... I was going to kiss Christine.”
“Go on,” Carella said, and he watched Hawes’s fists close into hard balls at his sides.
“I saw the body,” Jonesy said. “And I... I screamed. And then I recognized it was Birnbaum.”
“Where does this path lead?” Hawes snapped.
“To Birnbaum’s house. On the next lot.”
Kling came thrashing through the bushes. “Here it is, Steve,” he said, and he held out the brass casing. Carella looked at it. The side of the casing was stamped “357 MAGNUM.” The back end of the casing had the lettering fixed in a circle:
In any case, there was no doubt about what kind of a gun had fired this particular cartridge. Either a Colt or a Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver.
“A Magnum,” Carella said. “A big gun.”
“Not necessarily,” Hawes said. “Smith and Wesson puts out a Magnum with a short three-and-a-half-inch barrel.”
“In any event, this casing lets out our friend Martino with his Iver Johnson .22.”
“Yeah. What do we do now, Steve?”
“Call Homicide, I guess. With three detectives on the scene, I don’t think we ought to ring the local squad. Or should we?”
“I think we’d better.”
“Jesus, I’d hate like hell to break up the wedding.” He paused. “I don’t think Birnbaum would have wanted that, either.”
“Maybe we won’t have to.”
“How do you figure?”
“This spot is pretty well protected from your father’s lot. Maybe we can bring the photographers and the ME in through the next street, across Birnbaum’s back yard and through the bushes. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Carella said.
“What precinct is this, anyway?”
“The 112th, I think.”
“Know anybody on the squad?”
“No. Do you?”
“No.”
“So what makes you think they’ll do us a favor?”
“Professional courtesy. What the hell, it won’t hurt asking. You only get married once.”
Carella nodded and looked down at the lifeless body of Joseph Birnbaum, the neighbor. “You only die once, too,” he said. “Come on, Jonesy, back to the house. You, too, Miss Maxwell. Few questions I’d like to ask both of you. Bert, you come back and call the 112th. Cotton, will you stay with the body?” He suspected that Hawes might be better equipped for the diplomacy necessary with the 112th Squad than Kling was. But at the same time, he didn’t want a jealous male bellowing at an obviously frightened suspect while he questioned Jonesy and Christine further.
If Hawes appreciated Carella’s tactic, he showed no sign of it. He simply nodded and went to stand alongside the prostrate Birnbaum as the rest started back for the house.
In the distance, Hawes could hear the sound of the band, the sound of voices raised in laughter, the tiny faraway pops of the champagne corks. Closer, the insects filled the woods with their myriad noises. He swatted at a fly that had settled on his nose, and then lighted a cigarette. The path, he noticed, took a sharp turn several feet beyond where Birnbaum was lying. Idly, Hawes walked to the bend in the path, surprised when the woods around him suddenly ended to become the open lawn of the Birnbaum back yard. He glanced up at the Birnbaum house.
Something glinted in the attic window.
He looked again.
There was a sudden movement, and then the window presented nothing more than a blank open rectangle.
But Hawes was certain he’d seen a man with a rifle in that window a second ago.
A blonde in a red silk dress was sitting at the dressing table in the downstairs bedroom when Christine Maxwell entered the room. Carella had told her he wanted to question Jonesy alone and that he would get back to her shortly. She’d gone downstairs immediately in search of the ladies’ room. She wasn’t feeling at all well, and she wanted to wash her face and put on some fresh lipstick.
If anything, the blonde in the red silk dress made her feel worse.
As Christine put her small blue purse down on the dressing table, the blonde was adjusting her stocking, the red dress pulled back over her nylon, her magnificently turned leg rivaling that in any Hollywood boudoir scene. Standing beside the blonde in the tight, low-cut, over-flowing-in-abundance red silk, standing beside the splendidly outstretched leg, Christine Maxwell felt suddenly skinny and awkward. She knew this was absurd. She’d always thought of herself as rather well-proportioned, capable of provoking a whistle or two on any street corner in the city. But the blonde who smoothed the nylon over her extended leg was so munificently endowed, so regally statuesque, that Christine suddenly imagined she’d been fooling herself all these years. The blonde tightened her garter, her shoulders and breasts bobbing with the movement. Fascinated, Christine watched the rippling flesh.