vertigo, disturbed sense of balance, unsteadiness of gait, and tinnitus.'
'Tinnitus?'
'Ringing of the ears.'
'oh.'
'Liquid chromatography of the coagulated blood disclosed a drug called diclofenac, in concentrations indicating therapeutic doses. But the loose correlation between dosage and concentration is a semi quantitative process at best. All I can say for certain is that she was taking the drug, not why she was taking it. 'Why do you think she was taking it?'
'Well, we don't normally examine joints in a post, and I haven't here. But a superficial look at her fingers suggest what I'm sure a vertebral slice would reveal.' 'And what's that?'
'Lipping on the anterior visible portion.' 'What'slipping
'Knobby, bumpy, small excrescences of bone. In short, smooth, asymmetric swellings on the body of the vertebrae.'
'Indicating what?'
'Arthritis?'
'Are you asking?'
'Do you know whether or not she was arthritic?' 'She was.'
'Well, there,' Blaney said.
Hawes was still trying to remember the title of that movie. He asked Sam Grossman if he remembered seeing it.
'I don't go to movies,' Grossman said.
He was wearing a white lab coat, and standing before a counter covered with test tubes, graduated cylinders, beakers, spatulas, pipettes and flasks, all of
which gave his work space an air of scientific inquiry that seemed in direct contrast to Grossman himself. A tall, angular man with blue eyes behind dark-framed glasses, he looked more like a New England farmer worried about drought than he did the precise police captain who headed up the lab.
Some ranking E-flat piano player in the department had undoubtedly decided that the death of a once- famous concert pianist rated special treatment, hence the dispatch with which Svetlana's body and personal effects had been sent respectively to the Chief Medical Examiner's Office and the lab. The mink coat, the cotton housedress, the pink sweater, the cotton panty hose, and the bedroom slippers were all on Grossman's countertop, dutifully tagged and bagged. At another table, one of Grossman's assistants sat with her head bent over a microscope. Hawes looked her over. A librarian type, he decided, which he sometimes found exciting.
'Why do you ask?' Grossman said.
'Cause of death was two to the heart,' Carella said. 'Plenty of blood to support that,' Grossman said, nodding. 'All of it hers, by the way. Nobody else bled all over the sweater and dress. The dress is a cheap cotton schmatte you can pick up at any Woolworth's. The house slippers are imitation leather, probably got those in a dime store, too. But the sweater has a designer label in it. And so does the mink. Old, but once worth something.'
Which could have been said of the victim, too, Carella thought.
'Anything else?'
'I just got all this stuff,' Grossman said. 'Then when?'
'Later.'
'When later?'
'Tomorrow afternoon.'
'Sooner.'
'A magician I'm not,' Grossman said.
They went back to the apartment again.
The yellow CRIME SCENE tapes were still up. A uniformed cop stood on the stoop downstairs, his hands behind his back, peering out at the deserted street. It was bitterly cold. He was wearing earmuffs and a heavy- duty overcoat, but he still looked frozen to death. They identified themselves and went upstairs. Another of the blues was on duty outside the door to apartment 3A. A cardboard CRIME SCENE card was taped to the door behind him. The door was padlocked. He produced a key when they identified themselves.
Hidden under a pile of neatly pressed and folded, lace-trimmed silk underwear at the back of the bottom drawer in her dresser, they found another candy tin. There was a savings account passbook in it.
The book showed a withdrawal yesterday of an even one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, leaving a balance of sixteen dollars and twelve cents. The withdrawal slip was inserted in the passbook at the page that recorded the transaction. The date and time on the slip were January 20'I0:27 A.M.
This would have been half an hour before Svetlana Dyalovich went downstairs to buy a fifth of Four Roses.
According to Blaney and the man down the hall, she was killed some twelve hours later.
The man in apartment 3D did not enjoy being awakened at ten minutes to three in the morning. He was wearing only pajamas when he grumblingly unlocked the door for them, but he quickly put on a woolen robe, and, still grumbling, led the detectives into the apartment's small kitchen. A tiny window over the sink was rimed with frost. Outside, they could hear the wind howling. They kept on their coats and gloves.
The man, whose name was Gregory Turner, went to the stove, opened the oven door, and lighted the gas jets. He left the door open. In a few moments, they could feel heat beginning to seep into the kitchen. Turner put up a pot of coffee. A short while later, while he was pouring for them, they took off the coats and gloves.
He was sixty-nine years old, he told them, a creature of impeccable habit, set in his ways. Got up to pee every night at three-thirty. They'd got him out of bed forty minutes early, he didn't like this break in his routine. Hoped he could fall back asleep again after they were done with him here and he had his nocturnal pee. For all his grumbling, though, he seemed cooperative, even hospitable. Like buddies about to go on an early morning fishing trip, the three men sat around the oil cloth covered kitchen table sipping coffee. Their hands were warm around the steaming cups. Heat poured from the oven. Springtime didn't seem all that far away.
'I hated those records she played day and night,' he told them. 'Sounded like somebody practicing. All clasical music sounds that way to me. How could
anyone make any sense of it? I like swing, do you know what swing is? Before your time, swing. I'm sixty- nine years old, did I tell you that? Get up to pee regular every night at three-thirty in the morning, go back to sleep again till eight, get up, have my breakfast, go for along walk. Jenny used to go with me before she died last year. My wife. Jenny. We'd walk together in the park, rain or shine. Settled a lot of our problems on those walks. Talked them out. Well, I don't have any problems now she's gone. But I miss her like the devil.'
He sighed heavily, freshened the coffee in his cup. 'More?' he asked.
'Thank you, no,' Carella said.
'Just a drop,' Hawes said.
'Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, that was swing. Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers, wonderful stuff back then. You had a new song come out, maybe six, seven bands covered it. Best record usually was the one made the charts. 'Blues in the Night' came out, there must've been a dozen different big-band versions of it. Well, that was some song. Johnny Mercer wrote that song. You ever hear of Johnny Mercer?'
Both detectives shook their heads.
'He wrote that song,' Turner said. 'Woody Herman had the best record of that song. That was some song.' He began singing it. His voice, thin and frail, filled the stillness of the night with the sound of train whistles echoing down the track. He stopped abruptly. There were tears in his eyes. They both wondered if he'd been singing it to Jenny. Or for Jenny.
'People come and go, you hardly get a chance to say hello to them, not less you really know them,' he said. 'Woman who got killed tonight, I don't think I even knew her name till the super told me later on. All I knew was she irritated me playing those damn old records of hers. Then I hear three shots and first thing I wonder is did the old lady shoot herself?. She seemed very sad,' he said, 'glimpses I got of her on the stairs. Very sad. All bent and twisted and bleary-eyed, a very sad old lady. I ran out in the hall...'
'When was this?'
'Right after I heard the shots.'
