practice. My daughter’s on her soccer team. What do I tell them? Your father’s dead? They think he’s still upstate. What do I tell them?”
Carella listened silently. He never knew what to say. He never knew what the hell to say. She kept sobbing into the tissue, crumpled it, took another from the box. He waited.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He nodded.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“There are some questions we need to ask. If you’d rather I came back some other…”
“No, please. Ask me.”
He hesitated, took his notebook from the inner pocket of his jacket, opened it, and looked at the list of questions he and Ollie had prepared. They seemed suddenly stark. Her husband had been killed. He cleared his throat.
“Can you tell me what time he left here yesterday morning?”
“Why is that important?” she asked.
“We’re trying to work up a timetable, ma’am. If we can ascertain when…”
“I wish you’d stop calling me ‘ma’am,’” she said. “I’d guess we’re about the same age, wouldn’t you? How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m forty, ma’am.”
She looked at him.
“Mrs. Henderson,” he corrected.
“I’m forty-two,” she said.
He nodded.
She returned the nod.
The ice had been broken.
THERE WERE REPORTERSwaiting outside the station house when he got back there at a quarter to four that afternoon. A pair of blues were standing on the wide front steps, barring the way like soldiers outside the gates of ancient Rome. Carella moved past the teeming crowd on the sidewalk, approaching the steps with an authority that told them at once he was connected.
“Excuse me,” one of them said, “are you…?”
“No,” he said and went past them, and through the entrance doors with their glass-paneled upper sections adorned with the numerals “87” on each. Behind the muster desk, Sergeant Murchison was busy fielding phone calls. He looked up as Carella went past him, rolled his eyes, said into the phone, “You’ll have to contact Public Relations about that,” and hung up. Carella climbed the iron-runged steps to the second floor, stopped in the men’s room to pee, washed his hands, and then went down the corridor and into the squadroom. Everything seemed more or less normal here. He almost breathed a sigh of relief.
Meyer Meyer, bald and burly and blue-eyed, was at his desk talking to a woman who looked like a hooker but who was probably a housewife who’d got all dressed up in her shortest skirt to come report something-or- other terrible to the police. The woman appeared extremely agitated although scantily dressed. Meyer merely looked patient. Or perhaps bored.
At his own desk, Bert Kling, blond and hazel-eyed and sporting a beard that was coming in blond and patchy, but which he felt was essential to an undercover he was working, was on the phone with someone he kept calling Charlie, who was probably on a cell phone because Kling kept saying, “Charlie? Charlie? I’m losing you.”
Artie Brown, looking huge and menacing and dark and scowling, stood at the bulletin board, pondering the multitude of posters, notes, and announcements hanging there, glancing as well at the latest posted e-mail jokes from other police stations all over the country. Carella thought he detected a smile from him. He turned as Carella went by, waved vaguely in his direction, and then went back to his desk, where the phone began ringing furiously.
Another day, another dollar, Carella thought, and knocked on the lieutenant’s door.
DETECTIVE-LIEUTENANT PETER BYRNESdid not like high-profile cases. Given his druthers, he would have preferred that Lester Henderson had not lived in Smoke Rise, had instead lived across the river in the next state, or anyplace else but the Eight-Seven. He would have preferred that Ollie Weeks had not come calling with his courtesy request, although asking payback for saving someone’s life—twice, don’t forget—possibly qualified as something more substantial than a mere exchange of good manners. It was not unusual for cops in this city to ask favors of other precincts. Usually, but not always, they offered to share credit for any ensuing bust. Ollie had not deemed such an offer necessary. But, hey, he had saved Carella’s life.Twice!
The first time was when a lion was about to eat him.
Yes.
A lion was sitting on Carella’s chest, don’t ask.
Ollie shot the beast between the eyes, end of lion, end of story. Carella could still smell the animal’s foul breath.
The second time was a week or so later, when a blonde carrying an AK-47 was not about toeatCarella, more’s the pity, but was instead ready to shoot him in the eye or someplace when who should arrive upon the scene but the large man from the Eight-Eight—wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, though he did not kill her as dead as he had the lion. Carella could still smellherbreath, too. A whiff of Tic Tacs, as he recalled, spiked with that selfsame stink of imminent extinction.
Ollie had a right, Byrnes guessed. But he sure as hell wished nobody but the usual suspects had got killed yesterday morning.
“So what’d she have to say?” he asked Carella.
“Her husband wasn’t home Sunday night.”
“What do you mean?”
“I asked her when he left the house yesterday morning, she told me she didn’t know, he wasn’t home.”
“So where was he?”
“Upstate. Meeting with the Governor’s people.”
“That’s very nice, the Governor’s people,” Byrnes said.
“His wife told me they were trying to convince him to run for mayor.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t tell me this is going to get political,” Byrnes said.
“It could. He’s a politician, Pete. Was.”
“Too much bad blood between Democrats and Republicans these days,” Byrnes said, shaking his head.
“You think a Democrat killed him?”
He was smiling. The idea of a Democrat killing a Republican was somewhat amusing. For that matter, so was the idea of a Republican killing a Democrat.
“I don’t know who killed him,” Byrnes said. He was not smiling.
“You know something else? I don’t evencarewho killed him. This case belongs to His Lord Fatness, I don’t know how the hell we got involved in it.”
“Payback time, Pete.”
“You should try not to get yourself killed so often. And you should try to avoid obese saviors.”
“I’ll try.”
“Where’d Henderson stay upstate? Did she say?”
“I’ll ask her.”
“Call whichever hotel it was, find out what time he checked out, did he drive, did he take the train, did he fly, whatever. Give Ollie an ETA at the hall, and then tell him goodbye.”
“Yes, sir, is that an order, sir?”
“I don’t want this case,” Byrnes said.
AT SEVEN O’CLOCKthat Tuesday night, while Carella was at the dinner table with his wife and two children, Ollie Weeks called to say he was sorry he’d missed him at the office earlier today, but was it convenient for him to talk now?
“I’m in the middle of dinner,” Carella said.
“That’s okay,” Ollie said, “so am I.”
