would put you on your feet again six, six-thirty in the evening. That's when you have your lunch or dinner or whatever you might choose to call it at that hour. You're then free till around P.M. At that time of night, it shouldn't take more than half an hour, forty-five minutes to get to the precinct.
While you're asleep or spending some time with your family or friends, the precinct is awake bustling. A police station is in operation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the That accounts for its worn and shoddy look. Criminals never rest; neither does a police station. So while Carella and Hawes slept, the day worked from 7:45 in the morning to 3:45 in the afternoon, when the night shift took over. And while Carella was having dinner with Teddy and-the twins, and Hawes was making love with Annie Rawles, the night shift learned some things and investigated some
things but only some of these had to do with their two homicide cases.
During the hours of nine-fifteen that Sunday morning, when Carella and Hawes left the squad room and eleven forty-five that night, when they reported back to work again, things were happening out there. They would learn about some of these things later. Some of these things, they would never learn about.
At nine-thirty that Sunday morning, two of the Richards were in the empty lot across the street from the abandoned produce market, waiting for the other two Richards to come back with fresh pails of water. They had done a good job of cleaning the trunk of the black Richard's car, but now they wanted to make sure there weren't any bloodstains anyplace else. The other two had gone for fresh water and fresh rags at a car wash some three blocks away, under the expressway. This part of Riverhead was virtually forlorn at nine thirty on a Sunday morning. Hardly a car passed by on the overhead expressway. Empty window frames with broken shards of glass in them stared like eyeless sockets from abandoned buildings. The sun was shining brightly now, but there was a feel of snow in the air. Richard the Lion-Hearted knew when snow was coming. It was a sense he'd developed as a kid. He hoped snow wouldn't screw up what he had in mind. He was telling Richard the Second how he saw this thing.
'The girl dying was an accident,' he said. 'We were merely playing a game.'
'Merely,' Richard the Second said.
'She should've let us know if she was having difficulty breathing.'
'That would've been the sensible thing to do.' 'But she didn't. So how were we to know?' 'We couldn't have known.'
'In a sense, it was her own fault.'
'Did you come?' Richard the Second asked. 'Yes, I did.' 'I didn't.'
'I'm sorry, Richard.'
'Three hundred bucks, it would've been nice to come.'
'I think he took the money, you know.'
Who?'
'Richard. Took her money and the jumbos given her earlier. Nine hundred bucks and ten j 'You didn't see her bag anywhere around, did you.
When we carried her down to the car?'
'No, I didn't, come to think of it.'
'I'm sure he stole her bag with the money and jumbos in it. Which is how we're going to tie him to this thing.'
'Tie him to what thing?'
'The girl's accident. Yvonne. Whatever her was.'
'Claire, I think her name was. I wish I
had come before she passed out.' 'Well, that was her fault.' 'Even so.'
'We have to find that bag, Richard.'
'Which bag is that?'
'It's not in the car, I looked. It has to be in his apartment.'
'Which bag, Richard?'
'The one with the money and the jumbos in it. Once we find it, we can link him to the accident.'
'How?'
'If he stole the bag, his fingerprints'll be on it.' 'He might've wiped them off.'
'They only do that in the movies. Besides, he wouldn't have had time. We were all of us together, don't you remember? Wrapping her in the sheet, getting her downstairs into the trunk? He wouldn't have had time.'
'She was heavy.'
'She was.'
'She looked so small. But she was heavy.' 'Deceptive, yes.'
'I still don't understand about the bag.'
'What don't you understand?'
'How will it link him to the accident?' 'Well, his prints are on it.' 'Yes, but...'
'The prints will link him to it.'
'But if we go to the police with her bag...' 'No, no, no, we can't do that.' 'Then what?'
'We leave it alongside the body.'
'You think it's still there? She's probably in the morgue by now, don't you think?'
'I'm not talking about her body, Richard.'
Paul Blaney was trying to determine which had come first, the chicken or the egg. Had the white female corpse on his autopsy table suffocated to death, or had her death been caused by severe hemorrhaging from the genital area? He had already determined that there was a sizable amount of cocaine derivative in the bloodstream. The girl had not died of an overdose, that was certain, but the detectives nonetheless would want to know about the presence of the drug, which could mean that the murder was drug-related so what else was new? He wasn't confident that the detectives would care a whit whether she was so badly injured below that she had bled to death or whether the bag over her head had caused her to suffocate. But it was Blaney's job to determine cause of death and establish a postmortem interval.
He was not paid to speculate. He was paid to examine the remains and to gather the facts that led to a scientific conclusion. Suffocation in his lexicon was described as 'traumatic asphyxia resulting when obstructed air passages prevent the entrance of air to the lungs.' But if the girl had suffocated, then where were all the telltale signs? Where was the cyanosis of the face, the blue coloration he always found somewhat frightening, even after all these years performing autopsies? Where were the small circular ecchymoses on the scalp, those tiny bruises indicative of strangulation, smothering, or choking? Where were the minute blood spots in the whites of the eyes? Lacking any of these certain indications, Blaney cut open the girl's chest.
What black Richard was thinking as he lugged the water back from the car wash was he would go to the police and tell them these four rich kids from a prep school in Massachusetts someplace, Connecticut, wherever, a school named Pierce Academy stitched right there on the front of their parkas these three rich white football players had come to him to see did he have any dope to sell, which of course he did, you all know I deal a little dope every now and then, who's kidding who here? I'm not here to lie to you, gents, I'm here to help you.
Cops lookin at him like Sure, the nigger's here to help us. Started as a mere clocker in the hood, and now he's dealing five, six bills a day, he's here to help us. Get lost, nigger.
Hey, no. I seen these boys do a murder.
Ah?
Ears perkin up now.
'What're you smiling at?' Richard the Third asked. Hulking along in his blue parka with the big white P on the back, little football right under the P, carrying two pails of water, same as black Richard himself. Both of them with clean rags from the car wash stuffed in their pockets. Shagging along under the expressway. If it was nighttime stead of mornin right now, they could both get killed, this neighborhood.
'Whut I'm thinking,' Richard said, 'is soon as we finish here, you go your way, I go mine.'
And never the twain shall meet, he thought.
'It was a shame what happened to the girl,' the other Richard said.
'Mm.'
'But it wasn't our fault.'
'Sure as shit wasn't my fault, Richard thought. They were the ones holdin her down, doin her with the
