“An old drunk,” Doyle insisted.
“Besides,” Portoles said, “the TV lady got it.”
“Got what?” Carella said. “What TV lady?”
“His name,” Portoles said.
“He had to sign some kind of release,” Doyle said.
“What washername?” Kling asked. “The TV lady. Did you gethername?”
“Ohsure,” Doyle said, beaming. “Honey Blair, Channel Four News.Everybodyknows Honey Blair.”
• • •
CARELLA CALLED HERas soon as they got back to the squadroom. He got her answering machine.
“Miss Blair,” he said, “this is Detective Steve Carella, you probably won’t remember me, we met around Christmastime at the Grover Park Zoo, the case with the lady and the lions, do you remember? I need to know the name of the Vietnam vet you talked to outside King Memorial on the day Lester Henderson got shot and killed. One of the responding officers told us the man signed a release for you. If we could have his name, we’d appreciate it. You can call me back at Frederick seven, eight, oh, two, four, thanks a lot.”
She called back ten minutes later.
“Well, well,” she said, “Detective Carella.”
“Hi, Miss Blair, I’m glad you…”
“Honey,” she said.
“Thank you for returning my call, uh, Honey,” he said. “I won’t take much of your time. All I need…”
“You can take all the time you need with me,” Honey said.
“All I want is the name of the man you…”
“It’s Clarence Weaver, 702 Huxley Boulevard, I don’t have a phone number for him, what else is on your mind?”
“Nothing right now,” he said.
“When you think of something, give me another call,” Honey said.
There was a click on the line.
He looked at the receiver.
THE HAND-LETTEREDwooden sign over the entrance door readDSS HUXLEY. The DSS stood for Department of Social Services. Huxley Boulevard had once been a tree-lined esplanade with elegant apartment buildings on either side of it. The trees were still there, but the apartment buildings were now run by the city and were used for welfare housing. 702 Huxley had once been a movie theater. The seats had been torn out seven years ago, when the building was turned into a shelter for the homeless. That was where they found Clarence Weaver on that Monday afternoon a week after Henderson’s murder.
There were eight hundred and forty-seven cots in the shelter. Weaver was lying on cot number 312, his hands behind his head, his eyes closed. He was wearing khaki fatigues and a khaki-colored tank-top undershirt. He had taken off his shoes and socks. His feet were dirty, grime caked between the toes, the ankles smudged with filth from the streets.
Gently, Carella said, “Mr. Weaver?”
He sat upright, eyes snapping open. He truly looked too old and too frail ever to have served in Vietnam, a scrawny, unshaven, toothless black man with thin arms and a sunken chest, the stench of whiskey on his breath at two o’clock in the afternoon.
“Whut’s it?” he said at once, and looked around wildly, as if he had just heard incoming mail.
“It’s okay,” Carella said, and showed Weaver his shield. “We just want to ask you some questions.”
Weaver studied the shield carefully.
“I’m Detective Carella, this is my partner, Detective Kling.”
He looked up at the detectives, swung his legs over the side of the cot. “That TV station never sent me a nickel,” he said, and shook his head. “I axed was they a reward, the blond lady tole me to just please sign the release. I told them ever’thin I knowed, but nobody sent me nothin.”
“What is it you told them, Mr. Weaver? What did you see that morning?”
As Weaver recalls it, he was planning to enter the alley on the side of King Memorial…
“They’s two alleys,” he said, “one to the right, one to the left. One of them usually has nothin but papers an’ trash in the garbage cans, from the offices that side of the buildin. The other one sometimes has soda bottles in it, sometimes even food, from people usin the aud’torium for one reason or another. I was juss about to go in there to start mah search, when I seed this young feller come racin out the buildin…”
“When you say young…”
“Yessir.”
“How young?”
“Hard to say. You know how these young fellers look nowadays. Tall, kind of thin…”
“How tall?”
“Five-seven? Five-eight?”
Carella was thinking that wasn’t tall. Kling was thinking the same thing.
“White or black?” he asked.
“White man. He was a white man.”
“Clean-shaven? Or did he have a beard? A mustache?”
“No, nothin like that. Clean-shaven, I’d say.”
“Any scars? Did you notice any scars?”
“No, he was comin too fast. An the cap made it hard to see his face.”
“We understand he didn’t have a gun.”
“That’s right, he did not have a piece, suhs. I was in the Army, you know, I’m a Vietnam vet, I knows all about weapons. He did not have a weapon, this man. I was in Nam durin the Tet offensive, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” Kling said. “Sir, can you tell us what this man was wearing?”
“I tole the other officers, he had on blue jeans and a ski parka…”
“What color parka?”
“Blue. Darker than the jeans. An white sneakers, and this cap pulled down over his eyes.”
“What kind of cap?”
“A baseball cap.”
“What color was it?”
“Black.”
“Anything on it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Any letters for a team?”
“I still don’t get you.”
“NY for New York, or LA for Los Angeles…”
“SD for San Diego? The Padres?”
“M for the Milwaukee Brewers?”
Weaver was thinking.
“The Phillies?” Kling said.
“The Royals?”
“Anything like that?”
“Yes, they was letters on it,” Weaver said at last.
“Which team?”
“I got no idea.”
“Well, what’d you see, sir?”
“SRA.”
“SRA?” Kling said.
“The letters SRA, yessir.”
“SRA,” Carella repeated.
“You sure it wasn’t SF?” Kling asked. “For San Francisco? The San Francisco Giants?”
“Or SL?” Carella asked. “For the St. Louis Cardinals?”
