“How do you know that?”
“I feel certain they’re unrelated.”
“Then why were you checking them?”
“Detective …”
“Please don’t sound so annoyed,” Carella said.
He wanted to say, Don’t sound so fucking annoyed, okay, Mr. Special Agent Horne?
“I can subpoena those serial numbers,” he said.
“You’d never get a court order.”
“Why not?”
“Detective,” Horne said, and paused. “Let it go, okay? Leave it alone.”
“Sure,” Carella said, and hung up.
He had no intention of leaving it alone.
CLARA HOSKINS , as it turned out, was Jerome Hoskins’wife. On the phone, Ollie told her he was investigating something or other …
Actually, he mumbled the words “identification process” so that they were unintelligible, a bullshit ploy that did nothing to quell Mrs. Hoskins’ curiosity.
“You’re investigatingwhat?” she asked.
“Routine matter,” he said. “Better to discuss it in person. Okay to come out there, Mrs. Hoskins?”
“Well, all right, I guess,” she said. “But you’d better have identification.”
The drive to Calm’s Point took him half an hour from the North Side of the city to the bridge and over it into a community only recently reclaimed from urban decay. Hillside Commons consisted of low-rise tenements which had been inhabited by runaway hippies during the Sixties and Seventies, immigrant Hispanics in the early Eighties, Koreans in the Nineties, and now—here in the bright new millennium—upwardly mobile Yuppies yearning for a glimpse of the distant towers across the River Dix. The way Ollie looked at it, all those former immigrant residents could move right next door to Hillside Heights, where there were still street gangs and dope pushers and prostitutes and all the other amenities they were used to. Not that he liked the fuckin preppie Yuppies, either, but if an individual couldn’t speak the fucking language, he had no right living in a nice neighborhood.
Clara Hoskins spoke the language just fine.
She would not open the door until Ollie had flashed both his ID card and his gold detective’s shield, and then she unlocked two locks and took off a security chain before letting him in. She was a blonde in her early forties, Ollie guessed, dressed in tailored gray slacks and a tight red sweater with a little Santa Claus pin over the left breast. Five-seven, five-eight, he supposed, good-looking woman except for the suspicious blue eyes and the frown. She led him into the living room, where a Christmas tree was ablaze with light in one corner of the room. There was the scent of greenery all over the apartment, in fact. All the place needed was a log burning on the hearth, but this was the city, and only cannel coal was allowed, and not even that was in evidence.
“Mrs. Hoskins,” he said, figuring he’d get straight to the point, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
“Oh Jesus,” she said.
“Your husband is dead, ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this way.”
“Oh Jesus,” she said again.
They all reacted in different ways. Some of them burst into tears, some of them staggered around the room like drunks, some of them looked as if they’d been hit by a locomotive, some of them couldn’t speak for ten, fifteen minutes, some of them denied it, told you you’d made a mistake, or this was all a horrible joke, anything to get away from the fact that the Grim Reaper had come to the door and knocked on it and found somebody home. Clara Hoskins just stood there staring at him.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
“He was murdered,” Ollie said.
“Are you a homicide detective?” she asked.
“No, ma’am, that’s not the way we work it here. The precinct detective who catches the squeal …”
He caught himself.
“The responding detective follows the case through to its conclusion, ma’am, is the way we work it here in this city.”
“Where was this?” she asked.
“In a section of the city called Diamondback, ma’am.”
“That’s black, isn’t it?” she said.
“Largely, ma’am. And Hispanic.”
“What was Jerry doing up there?”
“I thought maybe you could help me with that.”
“Diamondback,” she said, and shook her head.
“Do I smell something baking, ma’am?” Ollie asked.
“Oh my God,” she said, “thank you,” and turned away from him and rushed into the kitchen. He watched as
