From Squad Three: Wife kills husband.
Nothing particularly noteworthy about that. Officers quickly learn that the “domestic trouble” call can be the most dangerous of all to answer. Could be anything from a simple and fairly civil disagreement to murder with the attendant threat to the police when they arrive on the scene.
Now this was a little different. According to the report, the husband had a long history of drinking and abusing his wife. He should have waited a bit longer to start drinking last night. He came home dead drunk and fell into bed. She took advantage of the lull in being beaten. She sewed him within the bedsheet and whacked him to death with her high-heeled shoes. A platter case.
Tully had to smile. He wondered if the guy who wrote the report had heard the one about the wife who had beaten her husband to death. When the investigating officer asked her why she’d done it, she answered, “Because he called me a two-bit whore.” Asked what she’d hit him with, she replied, “A sackful of quarters.”
From Squad Five: A kid. Damn! Another kid. Twelve years old, black, on Conners near 1-94. He was shoveling off the front walk of his parents’ home. A car-late model Ford-passed by, didn’t stop. Somebody leaned out from the passenger’s side. An automatic weapon. Squeezed off ten rounds. Ten rounds as they just drove by! The kid likely was dead before he hit the ground. DOA at St. John’s. No motive, no suspects. And, Tully added mentally, no hurry. Whoever shot the poor kid probably would be gunned down himself in time. In not a very long time. What a society!
The gang, such as it was, began to assemble.
First in was Phil Mangiapane. That surprised Tully.
Mangiapane sneezed, then blew his nose several times theatrically. Tully appreciated that Mangiapane was creating the groundwork for a few days’ medical leave. Tully was not going to volunteer Mangiapane for any sort of disability. Nature would have to take its course, no matter how sick the sergeant was-or thought he was.
“Oh, hi, Zoo,” Mangiapane said.
“Uh.” Tully continued to study the reports.
From Squad Four: Victim, white, fifty-eight years old. Shot at close range in front of residence, Birchcrest north of Curtis, name Lawrence Hoffer, employee archdiocese of Detroit, head of finance and administration. No robbery. No apparent motive. Nosuspect.
It was as if a crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. That elusive something that had been troubling Tully no longer troubled him. He looked around the squad room. Mangiapane was again elaborately blowing his nose.
“Manj,” tully called out, “what was the gun used on the Donovan woman?”
Mangiapane thought. For the duration of this dialogue he forgot to blow his nose. “A nine, I think, Zoo.”
“No, that’s the caliber he used when he was after the nun.”
“Oh, yeah. Lemmee think. Yeah, it was a.38.”
“Did we get a ballistics on that one yet?”
Mangiapane turned and sorted through the files. “No, not yet, Zoo. But there was no ‘urgent’ marked on it. They don’t usually get it in this soon.”
“We need it. Hop over to the ME’s office. I want the slug from a …” Tully consulted the report he was holding. “… Lawrence Hoffer;”
“Lawrence Hoffer?” Mangiapane wrote the name in his notepad.
“Yeah. He got it last night. The ME will have the record, the body, and the slug. I want that slug now.”
Mangiapane’s face screwed into an expression of great reluctance. “Geez, Zoo, can’t you send somebody else? I’m in no shape to spar with Willie Moellmann.”
Tully did not look up from the report he continued to study. “If anything, Mangiapane, you are a prime candidate to see a doctor. Judging from that cough, maybe soon you’ll need the ME.”
“Aw, Zoo …”
“Besides, if you’re lucky, maybe Moellmann won’t have Hoffer. Maybe one of the other docs will have him.”
Pouting almost like a child, Mangiapane began shrugging his huge frame into his coat and scarf. With a full head of dark hair, he never wore a hat. Which omission might have contributed to the severity of his present cold.
As the sergeant was about to leave the squad room, Tully called out one final order. “Manj, when you get the slug, I want you to take it directly to ballistics and see if they can make a match with the one that killed Helen Donovan. I want the test done now.”
“Now?”
“Not even this afternoon.”
“Now.”
“That’s right.”
Mangiapane left headquarters, but not willingly. He cursed himself for not following what would have turned out to be his better judgment and calling in sick. He had been sure that with his coughing and sneezing, his red nose and stuffy head and chest, he would be treated with kid gloves at work. He might have been sent home.; Which would have made him feel more justified in babying himself. At very least he had counted on staying inside allday.
Instead, here he was, monkey in the middle. Two of the most thankless jobs he could imagine were trying to hurry both the medical examiner and ballistics. Moellmann would subject him to verbal abuse, sarcasm, and humiliation. Ballistics would grouse about the burdens of the job and note that every cop wanted every report yesterday and just why did he think his case was so much more urgent than anyone else’s.
All the while, Mangiapane would know that on the other side Zoo Tully would not hear of failure.
Which left Mangiapane in the middle, enduring Moellmann-who, after exacting his satisfaction, would surrender the bullet. To be followed by a bout with ballistics that could be won only through dogged determination and perseverance.
In the end, it took Mangiapane until nearly noon to get the job done. At that, he had almost gone past Tully’s deadline of “this morning.” Personally, Mangiapane thought he’d done yeoman’s duty in completing both tasks in the space of a single day. Yet he knew that Tully would expect no less.
And so it was.
All the time Mangiapane had been gone on his rounds, Tully had been occupied with assignments, interrogations, and trying to stretch his decimated manpower.
Thus, when Mangiapane returned with his Mission Impossible report, Tully acted as if the sergeant were delivering the daily paper. Tully received the report wordlessly and gave Mangiapane another assignment, one which, fortunately, would not require his leaving the building. Mangiapane undertook the new assignment with the private resolve that he would spend the rest of the day on this one.
Tully took the report to his desk and, using the special talent that allowed him mentally to shut out every distraction, proceeded to study the findings.
He did not know, nor could he decide, whether the report spelled good or bad news, or some combination of the two.
There was no doubt: The gun that had killed Helen Donovan had been used again to kill Lawrence Hoffer, The kid Mangiapane had caught was trying to be a copycat killer.
Tully had to admit Mangiapane was taking it like a trooper. He had not apprehended the murderer of Helen Donovan after all. Still, he had prevented the murder of Joan Donovan. But it was hardly the coup he had been savoring.
Unknown to Tully, Mangiapane had not seen the report. So intent was he on getting the job done before noon, he had returned directly from ballistics with the unsealed envelope containing the findings.He did not yet know that his heroic proportions had been halved. But he would.
Now what have we? Tully wondered.
What we have is a series of questions.
Given: Somebody killed Helen Donovan, a hooker dressed as a nun, her sister. Why? Did the killer intend Helen as his victim? Or did he mistake Helen for Joan?
For a while it was thought one David Reading had killed Helen in a case of mistaken identity, then had returned to the precise scene of the crime and tried to correct his mistake by killing Joan, the real nun, but was
