“I fail to see your point.”
“Just that it seems so strange.”
“It does,” she agreed, and burst into tears again.
He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. He wanted to reach up under that tight red sweater.
“I wish I could play piano for you sometime,” he said.
She looked at him.
She had very blue sad wet eyes.
“To ease your pain,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, “that’s very kind of you.”
“I play piano,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have suspected it,” she said.
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said. “Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything.”
“What would I think of?” she asked.
“Anything that might help us find your husband’s murderer.”
She burst into tears again.
“Where do I go to … to claim … to … to … where is he now? His body?”
“At the St. Mary Boniface morgue,” Ollie said. “You can identify the remains …”
“Remains!” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, his body, ma’am. You don’t think he had a black girlfriend up there, do you?”
“A what!”
“I guess not,” he said. “Call me, okay? I know ‘Night and Day,’ if you happen to like that song.”
She was sitting by the Christmas tree in the living room, weeping, when he left the apartment. He could smell the goddamn apple upside down cake all the way down to the street.
THE HALLS OF JUSTICE were somewhat less than thronged with judges eager to hand down rulings at three o’clock on this Christmas Eve, which also happened to be a Sunday. Most pickpockets, shoplifters, and daytime burglars had called it a day yesterday, packing it in at six o’clock, when all the stores closed. Most of the judges had done the two-step at around the same time, the Christian judges eager to get back to their homes and hearths so they could start the Yuletide festivities, the judges of other faiths heading to vacation spots where they could escape a holiday that excluded them so completely. Only skeleton crews manned the courtrooms. The entire Criminal Courts building resembled nothing so much as a marble mausoleum.
Abe Feinstein was the judge who read Carella’s petition for a search warrant. He was sixty-three years old, and he’d been a criminal court judge for twenty-three years now, having been appointed at the age of forty, which was relatively young for such a judgeship. He read the signed affidavit and then peered over the rims of his eyeglasses and the top of his bench, and said in a rather astonished voice, “You want a warrant to search the offices of the U.S.Treasury Department?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Because—if I’m reading this correctly—you wish to examine a list ofserial numbers …”
“Yes, sir.”
“… for hundred-dollar bills that you believe may have been used asransommoney in a kidnapping?”
He still sounded astonished.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Carella said.
“Which kidnapping would that have been, Detective?”
“I don’t know, sir. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I must be missing something,” Feinstein said, and shook his head.
“Your Honor, a special agent named David A. Horne confiscated eight thousand dollars in hundred-dollar …”
“Hold it, hold it, where’s that on the affidavit?”
“Paragraph number three, Your Honor.”
“ ‘Upon personal knowledge and belief,’ ” Feinstein quoted, “ ‘and facts supplied to me by …’”
“Yes, Your Honor, by an ex-con named Wilbur Struthers, who burglarized the suspect money from the apartment of a woman now deceased, the victim of a homicide. That’s all in paragraph three, Your Honor.”
“Eaten bylions, does this say?”
“Yes, sir. At the Grover Park Zoo yesterday. But that wasn’t the cause of death. The woman was first stabbed with an ice pick.”
“I see that, yes.”
“In the head, Your Honor.”
