brief (well, brief in the annals of the Eight-Seven) relationship with one of his detectives. The look on Byrnes’s face indicated he did not want problems related to ancient love affairs. Eileen read the look, and registered his words, and didn’t know quite what to say. She had not seen Bert Kling in a very long time, and she knew he was now involved with someone else.
Standing before her new boss’s desk, wearing brown slacks and brown low-heeled pumps, an olive-green crewneck sweater with a matching cardigan over it, sunshine streaming through the Loot’s corner windows and setting her red hair ablaze, she wondered what gave him the right to intrude on her personal life, wondered if he would give the male half of this prior romance the same warning, and was tempted to tell him to go to hell. He must have read the look in her green eyes, must have seen County Cork flaring; he was Irish himself, after all.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” he amended.
“I’m sure there won’t be any problem, sir,” Eileen said.
Byrnes noted the “sir.” They had worked together before, when Eileen had been loaned to him as an undercover decoy, and back then it had been “Pete.” Now it was “sir,” which meant he’d got off on the wrong foot with her, something he didn’t particularly wish. In apology, he said, “You’re the first woman I’ve had on my squad, Eileen.”
“I know that, sir.”
“Make it Pete, can you?”
“Pete,” she said, and nodded.
“You may find it quiet around here,” he said. “After Hostage Negotiating.”
“In this city, nothing’s quiet,” she said.
As a matter of fact, hostage-taking had cooled down a bit in recent years. Oh sure, you had the occasional nut who shot his wife and two of his kids and was holding the third kid at gun point in a ratty apartment someplace in Majesta while the cops promised him an airplane to Peru and three dozen Hershey bars, but for the most part the bad guys had bigger things on their minds. You didn’t—in fact, couldn’t—send a negotiator to talk to some fanatic who had taken over an airliner. Maybe the Eight-Sevenwouldseem a little tame after standing face to face with a hostage-taker holding an AK-47 on his grandma, but maybe Eileen needed a rest in the country. Besides, from the inter-departmental jive she’d heard, the boys up here had recently been involved in a very big case involving the Treasury Department, the CIA, and God knew what else.
Byrnes was thinking he should tell her he’d try his best not to partner her with Kling—but that sounded apologetic. He was thinking he’d tell her that very often the working relationship between two detectives made the difference between life or death—but that sounded corny.
“Eileen,” he said simply, “we’re a tight-knit family here. Welcome to it.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “Pete.”
Which was when a knock sounded on the lieutenant’s door.
“Come,” Byrnes said.
The door opened—and speak of the devil.
AT TWENTY MINUTESto nine that Wednesday morning—some fifteen minutes after he’d stepped into the lieutenant’s office to encounter a redheaded ghost—Bert Kling was at the wheel of an unmarked police sedan driving himself and Carella uptown to the Eight-Eight.
“I have to tell you the truth,” he said, “my heart stopped.”
Carella said nothing. He had called the lieutenant the night before, and told him about Ollie Weeks’s offer of a fifty-fifty bust, if ever there was one. He had told the lieutenant that you had to grab this city by the balls before it grabbed you first. He had told him that opportunity knocks but once, and it wasn’t every cop in the world who got invited to talk onLarry King.
“Oliver Wendell Weeks has spoken,” he’d said.
Byrnes had responded, “Let’s go for it.”
So here he was on the way uptown again, listening to Kling tell him all about how he’d felt upon seeing, after all this time, the woman who had once been the love of his life.
It had begun raining.
The Eight-Seven had investigated a case one March where it had rained almost constantly. They would later refer to it as “The Rain Case,” even though it had involved finding a severed hand in an airline bag. In this city, rain could actually be pleasant sometimes. Not this morning. The rain was driving and incessant, falling from the sky in buckets—to coin a phrase—cascading onto the windshield where the wipers worked in vain to maintain some semblance of visibility.
“I felt like telling her I used to love her a lot,” Kling said. “But the Loot was sitting right there, and besides I didn’t want to give her the idea there might be anything there anymore.”
“So whatdidyou say?” Carella asked.
“Well, Pete told me she’d be working with us from now on, so I said, ‘Glad to have you aboard,’ or something stupid like that, and we shook hands. It felt strange shaking hands. I mean…we were together a long time, you know, we were acouple.And now we were just shaking hands. Like strangers. That’s when I felt like telling her I used to love her a lot. While we were shaking hands.”
“We can park behind the station,” Carella said, “go in the back way.”
Kling leaned over the wheel, squinting through the windshield to locate the driveway, and then swung the car into the lot. He parked in a space as close to the building as he could find, but they both almost drowned before they’d stepped a foot out of the car to begin a mad dash to the rear door of the station house.
All of these old precincts had the same layout. They could just as easily have been entering the Eight-Seven as the Eight-Eight. They came into a long corridor illuminated by a naked light bulb. No one inside the door, it occurred to Carella that some lunatic with a bomb could just march in. He made a mental note to mention this to Byrnes when they got back home. Down the corridor, past an old defunct coal-burning furnace, up a flight of wooden steps to a door that opened onto the first-floor muster room. Same muster desk as the Eight-Seven’s, different sergeant behind it. He either recognized Carella and Kling, or else didn’t give a damn that they might be desperate terrorists.
Mobile radio rack to the left of them, rack with vests to the right. Up the iron-runged stairs to the second floor, past a men’s room, and a ladies’ room, and then through a gate in a slatted wooden railing identical to the one back home, and there you were, face to face with His Royal Girth.
“You’re late,” Ollie said, grinning.
It was 9:01A.M.
Here, too, were the familiar sounds and smells. The ringing telephones, the aroma of coffee brewing on a hot plate, the stale odor—especially on a rainy day—of a room that had seen too many days and nights of use and abuse, and there, yes, the faintest trace of a scent only cops could identify as coming from the black ink on the fingerprint table across the room. One of the windows across the room was open just a crack. There was even an unaccustomed whiff of fresh air. All so very familiar. Especially if you watched television.
“We found the bag,” Ollie said.
Kling wondered what bag.
For a moment, Carella wondered the same thing.
“Oh, the bag,” he said, remembering.
Ollie rose from his swivel chair like a whale off the coast of Mexico. He waddled across the room to where one of those small black airline bags on wheels rested near the water cooler. Yanking out the handle, he wheeled the bag over to his desk, hoisted it onto its top and—like a magician about to pull a rabbit from a top hat— unzipped the bag, and threw back the flap.
“This is what a city councilman packs for an overnight trip,” he said, and opened his hands wide. “Found it sitting on the stage, near the rear wall.”
The clothing in the bag was stuffed into it like laundry—which is what it undoubtedly was. These were the clothes Henderson had worn during his two-night stay in the state’s capital. Packed in the bag were a pair of men’s undershorts, two pairs of dark blue socks, a blue, long-sleeved, button-down shirt, a similar white shirt, a blue tropical weight suit, a blue-and-green-striped silk tie, a pair of black shoes, a toilet kit, and an electric razor.
“He was wearing jeans, loafers, and a faggoty pink sweater when he got killed,” Ollie said. “Probably wore them home on the plane.”
