'It ain't a threat, but you can take it as one if you wish.'
'Can I leave now?' Helen said again.
'Cause you know,' Ollie said, 'I don't give a rat's ass about what's politically correct or what ain't. All I want to do is learn my five songs and my five Pope jokes, is all I want to do, and maybe in my spare time find out who stabbed this little girl. So if you got no further advice to dispense here . . .'
'Is it all right if I go?' Helen asked.
'Go already, lady,' Monoghan said.
'Thank you, Officers,' she said, and hurried out of the apartment.
'What if I told you I myself was Irish?' Ollie asked.
'I wouldn't believe you,' Monroe said.
'Why? Cause I ain't drunk?'
'That's the kind of remark can get you in trouble,' Monoghan said, wagging his finger under Ollie's nose.
'I once bit off a guy's finger, was doing that,' Ollie said, and grinned like a shark.
'Bite this a while,' Monoghan said.
'Good thing the piano teacher's already gone,' Ollie said, shaking his head in dismay.
'Who's in charge here?' one of the technicians asked from the doorway.
'Well look who's here!' Ollie said.
'Keep us advised,' Monoghan said.
You fat bastard, he thought, but did not say.
That Wednesday morning, at a few minutes past eleven, Arthur Brown knocked on the door to Cynthia Keating's apartment.
'Yes, who is it?' she asked.
'Police,' Brown said.
'Oh,' she said. There was a long silence. 'Just a minute,' she said. They heard a latch turning, tumblers falling. The door opened a crack, held by a security chain. Cynthia peered out at them.
'I don't know you,' she said.
Brown held up his shield.
'Detective Brown,' he said. 'Eighty-seventh Squad.'
'I already spoke to the others,' she said.
'We have a few more questions, ma'am.'
'Is this legal?'
'May we come in, please?'
'Just a second,' she said, and closed the door to take off the chain. She opened it again, said, 'Come in,' and preceded them into the apartment. 'This better be legal,' she said.
'Ma'am,' Kling said, 'do you know a man named John Bridges?'
'No. Let me see your badge, too,' she said.
Kling fished out a small leather holder, and flashed the gold and blue-enameled shield.
'Excuse me,' she said, and went directly to the telephone on the kitchen wall. She dialed a number, waited, listening, and then said, 'Mr Alexander, please. Cynthia Keating.' She waited again. 'Todd,' she said, 'the police are here. What's your advice?' She listened again, nodded, kept listening, finally said, 'Thanks, Todd, talk to you,' and hung up. 'Gentlemen,' she said, 'unless you have a warrant for my arrest, my attorney suggests you take a walk.'
There was something very comforting about being alone at last in the dead girl's apartment. First of all, the silence. This city, the one thing you could never find anyplace was peace and quiet. There were always sirens going, day and night, police or ambulance, and there were car horns honking, mostly taxicabs, foreigners from India or Pakistan leaning on their horns day and night because they were remembering how fast their camels used to race across the desert sands where there were no traffic lights. Noisiest damn city in the entire universe, this city. Ollie much preferred the silence here in the dead girl's apartment.
He sometimes felt if he hung around a dead person's apartment long enough, he would pick up the vibrations of the killer. Get into his or her skin somehow. He had read a story once—he hated reading—where the theory was the image of a person's murderer would be left on the person's eyeballs, the retina, whatever. Total bullshit. But the silence in a victim's apartment was almost palpable, and he gave real credence to the notion that if he stood there long enough, in the silence, the vibrations of the killer would seep into his bones, though to tell the truth this had never happened to him. Nonetheless, he stood stock still at the foot of the dead girl's bed now, imagining her as he'd first seen her on the kitchen floor, knife in her chest, trying to feel what the killer had felt while he was stabbing her, trying to get into his skin. Nothing happened. Ollie sighed, farted, and began his solitary search of Althea Cleary's apartment.
What he hoped he definitely would not find was her parents' names. He did not want to have to call them personally and tell them their daughter was dead. He wasn't good at such stuff. To Ollie, when a person was dead he was dead, and you didn't go around wringing your hands or tearing out your hair. He couldn't think of
a single dead person he missed, including his own mothe and father. He guessed if his sister Isabelle died, he woul miss her a little, but not enough to be the one who got u and said some kind words about her at the funeral servic because to tell the truth he couldn't think of a single kini thing he might care to say about her, dead or alive. Lik most living people, Isabelle Weeks was a pain in the ass She once told him he was a bigot. He told her to go fuel herself, girlfriend.
He had already looked through the dead girl's addres book and appointment calendar, but he hadn't found an; listings for anybody named Cleary. There were a fev names for people in Montana, which wasn't either Ohi( or Idaho or Iowa as the super had guessed, but thes< weren't Clearys, and he didn't plan on calling somebody in Montana just to find out if they were related to ; dead black girl he didn't want to tell them about in th( first place. Her appointment calendar wasn't much help either. She probably was new here in the city, whicl maybe explained why she had cappuccino all the time with the lady upstairs who taught piano. Ollie woulc have to give her a call. Night and Day, he thought And maybe Satisfaction, which was one of his favorite songs, too.
He went to the girl's dresser now, and opened the top drawer, looking for he didn't know what, anything thai would tell him something about either her or whoever had been with her on the night she died. There were cops who went by the book, canvassed the neighborhood first, asked Leroy and Luis, Carmen and Clarisse did they see anybody going in or out of the apartment, but up here in Zimbabwe West, nobody ever saw nothing if you were a cop. Anyway, he preferred getting to know the vie first, and then getting to know whoever knew her. Besides, Ollie liked dead people much better than he did most living ones. Dead people didn't
give you any trouble. You went into a dead person's apartment, you didn't have to worry about farting or belching. Also, if the vie was a girl, you could handle her panties or panty hose—like he was doing now— without anybody thinking you were some kind of pervert. Ollie sniffed the crotch of a pair of red panties, which was actually good police work because it would tell him was the girl a clean person or somebody who just dropped panties she had worn right back in the drawer without rinsing them out. They smelled fresh and clean.
Being in her apartment, sniffing her panties, going through the rest of her underwear, and her sweaters and her blouses and her high-heeled shoes in the closet, and her coats and dresses, one of them a blue Monica Lewinsky dress, going through all her personal belongings, trying to find something, wondering what kind of person could have stabbed the girl it looked like half a dozen times and then left a fuckin bread knife sticking out of her chest, opening her handbag and rummaging through the personal girl things in it, he felt both privileged and inviolate, like an invisible burglar.
Carl Blaney was weighing a liver when Ollie got downtown at four o'clock that Wednesday afternoon. It was still raining, though not as hard as it had been earlier. The morgue and the rain outside both had the same stainless steel hue. He watched as Blaney transferred the liver from the scale to a stainless steel pan. Personally, Ollie found body parts disgusting.
'Is that hers?' he asked.
'Whose?' Blaney said.
'The vic's.'
'That's all we've got here is vies.'
'Althea Cleary. The little colored girl got stabbed.' 'Oh, that one.'
