One of the technicians had been hovering. He caught
Carella's eye now. Carella nodded and went over to him.
'Blue cashmere belt,' the technician said. 'Blue cashmere fibers over the door hook there. What do you think?'
'Where's the belt?'
'Near the chair there,' he said, and indicated the easy chair near the room's single dresser. A blue bathrobe was
draped over the back of the chair. The belt to the robe was
on the floor, alongside the dead man's shoes and socks.
'And the hook?'
'Back of the bathroom door.'
Carella glanced across the room. The bathroom door
was open. A chrome hook was screwed into the door,
close to the top.
'The robe has loops for the belt,' the technician said.
'Seems funny it's loose on the floor.'
'They fall off all the time,' Carella said.
'Sure, I know. But it ain't every day we get a guy dead in bed who looks like maybe he was hanged.'
'How strong is that hook?'
'It doesn't have to be,' the technician said. 'All a hanging does is interrupt the flow of blood to the brain. That can be done by the weight of the head alone. We're talking an average of ten pounds. A picture hook can support that.'
'You should take the detective's exam,' Carella sug
gested, smiling.
'Thanks, but I'm already Second Grade,' the techni
cian said. 'Point is, the belt coulda been knotted around
the old man's neck and then thrown over the hook to hang
him. That's if the fibers match.'
'And provided he didn't customarily hang his robe
over that hook.'
'You looking for a hundred excuses to prove he died
ii
of natural causes? Or you looking for one that says it could've been homicide?'
'Who said anything about homicide?'
'Gee, excuse me, I thought that's what you were looking for, Detective.'
'How about a suicide made to look like natural causes?'
'That'd be a good one,' the technician agreed.
'When will you have the test results?'
'Late this afternoon sometime?'
'I'll call you.'
'My card,' the technician said.
'Detective?' a man's voice said.
Carella turned toward the kitchen doorway where a
burly man in a dark gray coat with a black velvet collar
was standing. The shoulders of the coat were damp with
rain, and his face was raw and red from the cold outside.
He wore a little mustache under his nose, and he had puffy
cheeks, and very dark brown eyes.
'I'm Robert Keating,' he said, walking toward Carella,
but not extending his hand in greeting. His wife stood just
behind him. They had obviously talked since he'd come
into the apartment. There was an anticipatory look on her
face, as if she expected her husband to punch one of the
detectives. Carella certainly hoped he wouldn't.
'I understand you've been hassling my wife,' Keating
said.
'I wasn't aware of that, sir,' Carella said.
'I'm here to tell you that better not be the case.'
Carella was thinking it better not be the case that your wife came in here and found her father hanging from the bathroom door and took him down and carried him to the bed. That had better not be the case here.
'I'm sorry if there was any misunderstanding, sir,' he said.
'There had better not be any misunderstanding,' Keating said.
'Just so there won't be,' Carella said, 'let me make
our intentions clear. If your father-in-law died of a heart
attack, you can bury him in the morning, and you'll never see us again as long as you live. But if he died for some other reason, then we'll be trying to find out why, and you're liable to see us around for quite a while. Okay, sir?'
'This is a crime scene, sir,' the technician said. 'Want
to clear the premises, please?'
'What?' Keating said.
At four-thirty that afternoon, Carella called the lab downtown and asked to talk to Detective/Second Grade Anthony Moreno. Moreno got on the phone and told him the fibers they'd lifted from the hook on the bathroom door positively matched sample fibers from the robe's blue cashmere belt.
Not ten minutes later, Carl Blaney called Carella to tell him that the autopsy findings in the death of Andrew Henry Hale were consistent with postmortem appearances in asphyxial deaths.
Carella wondered if Cynthia Keating's husband would
accompany her to the squadroom when they asked her to come in.
Robert Keating turned out to be a corporate lawyer who
was wise enough to recognize that the police wouldn't
be dragging his wife in unless they had reason to believe
a crime had been committed. He'd called a friend of his who practiced criminal law, and the man was here now,
demanding to know what his client was doing in a police station, even though he'd already been informed that Mrs
Keating had been invited here, and had arrived of her own
volition, escorted only by her husband.
Todd Alexander was a stout little blond man wearing
a navy blue sports jacket over a checkered vest and gray
flannel trousers. He looked as if he might be more at home attending a yachting meet than standing here in one of the city's grubbier squadrooms, but his manner was that of a man who had dealt with countless bogus charges brought by hundreds of reckless police officers, and he seemed completely unruffled by the present venue or the circumstances that necessitated his being here.
'So tell me what this is all about,' he demanded. 'In
twenty-five words or less.'
Carella didn't even blink.
