But the policeman was gone, down through the fire door towards the bowling alley below.
‘Pussywagon, my ass,’ Zipper growled, then he leaned out the door. ‘Steamboat!’
‘Yeah, boss.’
‘Take that fuckin’ dumbass to the Gradys and get his head stitched up and then fire his ass.’
At four A.M., Friscoe quit for the night. He drove home, grumbling to himself, angry because he had turned up nothing at all in six hours of hard work. His back ached and his eyes burned as he entered the house, passing up his customary raid on the refrigerator and going straight to the bedroom. He went into the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light so as not to awaken Sylvia, splashed cold water on his face, and sat on the commode to take off his shoes. He sighed with relief as be dropped them on the floor, then went back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, bone weary and almost too tired to get undressed.
His wife rolled over and said sleepily, ‘Barney?’
‘No, it’s Robert Redford,’ he said wearily.
‘Oh, how nice.’
‘If he was as tired as I am, you could forget it.’
‘What time is it’?’
‘Past four. I’m dead. My feet feel like I just ran the Boston Marathon.’
‘You would’ve been proud of Eddie, Barney. He did just fine.’
‘Jeez, I completely forgot. Did you explain? Did it embarrass him I had to leave like that, right in the middle of Prokofiev?’
‘He understood. Nobody saw from the stage; they were very busy.’
The lieutenant pulled and tugged at his clothes until they lay in a pile at his feet, then he fell back on the bed in his:
undershorts.
‘Jesus, Syl, there’s got to be an easier way to make a living.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘It never ends. You clean up one, there’s two more in its place.’
She rose on one elbow and rubbed his temple with two fingers.
‘You been saying that since the day we got married,’ she said.
But Friscoe did not hear her. His breathing had already, settled into a steady drone. Sylvia got up and puffed the covers over him and went into the bathroom.
A moment later the phone rang.
Before she could get back to it, Friscoe, from years of experience, reached out and answered it without opening his eyes.
‘Barney?
‘Umm.’
‘Is that you, Friscoe?
‘Uh.. . yeah.’
‘It’s Max Grimm. You awake?’
‘Almost. . . uh, you finish the autopsy?
‘Oh, on the girl? Abrams got that hours ago. I’ve got something else you ought to know about. Are you listening?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘You remember, I told you Riley had a couple of John Does down here in the icehouse?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, I just finished the post mortem on one of them.’
‘Christ, what the hell time is it?’
‘Who knows? I been going so long I can’t stop now. Anyway, this p.m. I just finished? They found the corpse out in the city dump yesterday afternoon. A real messy thing. Face blown off, both hands are missing.’
‘Hands missing?’
‘Yeah, cut off at the wrist. No clothes, no I.D., nothing.’
‘Twigs, I got one too many bodies on my hands already.’
‘Listen to me. Like I say, his face was blown off, nothing left, no way to identify him, okay?’
‘Um hmm.’
‘But that isn’t what killed him. He was drilled through the right eye. A single .22 calibre long rifle-bullet, with the end dum-dummed. It flattened out and laid up against the back of the skull on the inside.’
