on the earie.”
“I’m eager to find this broad,” Ollie said.
“How much are we talkin here?” Donner asked. “You tell me the Gucci was a two-bit transaction…”
“I’m thinking a C-note if you find her for me.”
“You’re thinking small, dad. This is the twenty-first century.”
“And Castleview is still a penitentiary,” Ollie said.
“Oh dear, don’t threaten me, dad.”
“It’s all I know how to do,” Ollie said, and grinned like a barracuda.
“Make it a deuce,” Donner said.
“Let’s see what you come up with.”
“Emmy,” Donner said. “Let’s see.”
AT A QUARTERto four that Thursday afternoon, just as the night shift was gathering before the muster desk downstairs, preparing to relieve on post at fourP.M., and just as detectives were beginning to wend their separate ways up the iron-runged stairway that led to the second-floor squadroom, Pamela Henderson stopped at the desk and asked Sergeant Murchison where she could find a Detective Steve Carella. Murchison picked up a phone, pushed a button on it, said a few words into the receiver, and then told her to go up the steps there to the second floor and down the corridor.
Carella was waiting inside the slatted wooden railing to greet her. He opened the gate, led her in, and offered her a chair at his desk.
Still wearing black—her husband had been dead only four days, after all—she looked somehow taller than she had in jeans and a turtleneck, perhaps because she was wearing high-heeled pumps with the black skirt and jacket. She sat, crossed her legs, and said, “Is this an inconvenient time? I sense a changing of the guard.”
“Not at all,” Carella said. “I had some papers to file, anyway.”
Pamela looked at him and nodded.
He sensed that she didn’t quite trust him.
He said, “Really, I’m in no hurry. How can I help you?”
Still, she hesitated.
“Really,” he said again.
She sighed heavily. Nodded again.
“I found some letters,” she said.
He glanced, he hoped surreptitiously, at the clock on the wall, and he thought, What this case doesn’t need at a quarter to four in the afternoon, ten to four already, after a long hard day when I’m ready to pack it in and go home to my wife and family, what this case definitely does not need is more complications, this case already has enough complications.
Ollie had called him earlier to tell him the gun was found on the wrong side of the hall. Now here was the murdered man’s wife telling him she’d found some letters, which he somehow suspected were not letters from her mother.
“Letters from whom?” he asked.
“Someone named Carrie.”
“As in Grant?”
“No, as in Stephen King.”
“A woman.”
“Yes. A woman.”
Landing on the word heavily. A woman. Yes.
“To whom were these letters addressed, Mrs. Henderson?”
“To my husband,” she said.
Carella pulled on the white cotton gloves.
THERE WERE THREEletters in all.
All of them written in a delicate hand, in purple ink on pale lavender writing paper. The stationery was obviously expensive, embossed with the monogrammed initials JSH. If there had been matching envelopes to go with the single sheet of paper in each envelope, they had not been used for these mailings. Instead, Carrie—for such was how she’d signed her name—had used plain white envelopes she could have bought in any variety store for ten cents apiece. In her same delicate handwriting, she had addressed the letters to Councilman Lester Henderson at his office downtown. Hand-lettered across the face of each envelope were the councilman’s name and address and the wordsPERSONAL AND PRIVATE. The envelopes had been postmarked at a post office in an area called Laughton’s Market, one of the city’s better neighborhoods.
The first letter read:
My darling Lester:
I can’t believe this is really happening! Will we really be alone together for two full nights? Will you really not have to watch a clock or catch a taxi? Will I be able to sleep in your arms all night long, wake up in your arms the next morning, linger in your arms, make love to you as often as I like, spoil you to within an inch of your life? Will this really happen this coming weekend? I can’t believe it. I’m afraid if I pinch myself, I’ll wake up. Hurry to me, my darling, hurry, hurry, hurry.
Carrie
The second letter read:
My darling Lester:
When you receive this, it will be Tuesday. On Saturday morning I’ll be boarding an airplane that will fly me to the Raleigh Hotel in a city I’ve never visited, there to await the arrival of the man I love so very much. I cannot wait, I simply cannot wait. I love you to death, I adore you.
Carrie
Carella slipped the letters back into their envelopes.
“You know,” he said, “maybe it would be better if I…”
“I’ve read them all,” Pamela said. “Don’t worry about me. I’m beyond shock.”
He nodded, and opened the third envelope.
My darling Lester:
It will be Friday when you receive this. Tomorrow morning, I will take a taxi to the airport, and fly into your waiting arms. I love you, my darling, I adore you, I am completely and hopelessly madly in love with you, am I gushing? So allow me to gush. I’m nineteen, I’m entitled.
Carrie
“So, uh, where’d you find these?” Carella asked, folding the last letter, sliding it back into its envelope, busying himself with the task, not looking at Lester Henderson’s widow, who sat beside the desk in monumental silence.
“In his study. At the back of a drawer in his desk.”
“When was this?”
“This morning.”
He didn’t ask what she was doing in his desk. A man dies, you go through his things. Death robs everyone of privacy. Death has no respect for secrets. If you’re fucking a nineteen-year-old girl, don’t leave her letters around. Death will uncover them.
“Does the name mean anything to you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t know anyone named Carrie?”
“No one.”
“How about the monogram. JSH. Do those initials ring a bell?”
“No.”
“They don’t seem to match the name ‘Carrie.’”
“No, they don’t.”
“Did you suspect any of this?”
“No.”
“Any idea your husband was…uh…?”
