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  “Her having nice tits?”

  “No, her being blonde…can you please pay attention here? She asks me, ‘Can I help you, sir?’ And I tell her I’d like two non-alcoholic beers, please.”

  “When you say ‘nice tits,’ is that what you really mean? ‘Nice tits’?”

  “What?”

  “Is that a truly accurate description? ‘Nice tits’?”

  “Can you please tell me what that has to do with my story.”

  “For the sake of accuracy,” Monroe said, and shrugged.

  “Forget it, then,” Monoghan said.

  “Because there’s an escalation of language when a person is discussing breast sizes,” Monroe said.

  “I’m not interested,” Monoghan said, and looked down again at the breasts of the dead woman.

  “The smallest breasts,” Monroe said, undeterred, “are what you’d call ‘cute boobs.’ Then the next largest breasts are ‘nice tits’…”

  “I told you I’m not…”

  “…and then we get to ‘great jugs,’ and finally we arrive at ‘major hooters.’ That’s the proper escalation. So when you say this blonde bartender had nice tits, do you really mean…?”

  “I really mean she had ‘nice tits,’ yes, and that has nothing to do with my story.”

  “I know. Your story has to do with ordering non-alcoholic beer when you don’t even need to lose weight.”

  “Forget it,” Monoghan said.

  “No, tell it. I’m listening.”

  “You’re sure you’re not still distracted by the bartender with the great tits or the cute hooters or whatever the hell she had?”

  “You’re mixing them up.”

  “Forgive me, I didn’t know this was an exact science.”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm. I’m tryin’a help your story, is all.”

  “So let me tell it then.”

  “So tell it already,” Monroe said, sounding miffed.

  “I ask the bartender for two non-alcoholic beers, and a Chinese manager or whatever he was, standing there at the service bar says, ‘We can’t sell you beer to take home, sir.’ So I said, ‘Why not?’ So he says, ‘I would lose my liquor license.’ So I said, ‘This isn’t alcohol, this is non-alcoholic beer. It would be the same as my taking home a Diet Coke.’ So he says, ‘I order my non-alcoholic beer from my liquor supplier. And I can’t sell it to customers to take home.’ So I said, ‘Who can you sell it to if not customers?’ He says, ‘What?’ So I say, “If you can’t sell it to customers, who can you sell it to? Employees?’ So he says, ‘I can’t sell it to anyone. I would lose my liquor license.’ So I say, ‘This is not liquor! This is non-alcoholic!’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ ”

  “So did you get the beer or not?”

  “I did not get it. And it wasn’t beer. It was non-alcoholic beer.”

  “Which you don’t need, anyway, a diet.”

  “Forget it,” Monoghan said, sighing, and a voice from the entrance door said, “Good morning, people. Who’s in charge here?”

  The ME had arrived.

  Detectives Meyer and Carella were just a heartbeat behind him.

  YOU COULDN’T MISTAKE them for anything but cops.

  Monoghan and Monroe might have been confused with portly pallbearers at a gangland funeral, but Meyer and Carella—although they didn’t look at all alike—could be nothing but cops.

  Detective Meyer Meyer was some six feet tall, a broad-shouldered man with China-blue eyes and a completely bald head. Even without the Isola PD shield hanging around his neck and dangling onto his chest, even with his sometimes GQ look—on this bright May morning, he was wearing brown corduroy slacks, brown socks and loafers, and a brown leather jacket zipped up over a tan linen shirt—his walk, his stance, his very air of confident command warned the criminal world at large that here stood the bona fide Man.

  Like his partner, Detective Stephen Louis Carella exuded the same sense of offhand authority. About the same height as Meyer, give or take an inch or so, dark-haired and dark-eyed, wearing on this late spring day gray slacks, blue socks, black loafers, and a blue blazer over a lime-green Tommy Hilfiger shirt, he came striding into the room like an athlete, which he was not—unless you counted stickball as a kid growing up in Riverhead. He was already looking around as he came in just a step behind both Meyer and the Medical Examiner, who was either Carl Blaney or Paul Blaney, Carella didn’t know which just yet; the men were twins, and they both worked for the Coroner’s Office.

  In answer to Blaney’s question, Monroe said, “We were in charge until this very instant, Paul, but now that the super sleuths of the Eight-Seven…”

  “It’s Carl,” Blaney said.

  “Oh, I beg your parmigiana,” Monroe said, and made a slight bow from the waist. “In any event, the case is now in the capable hands of Detectives Meyer and Carella, of whose company I am sure you already have had the pleasure.”

  “Hello, Steve,” Blaney said. “Meyer.”

  Carella nodded. He had just looked down at the body of the dead woman. As always, a short sharp stab, almost of pain, knifed him between the eyes. He was looking death in the face yet another time. And the only word that accompanied the recognition was senseless.

  “Nice jugs, huh, Doc?” Monoghan remarked.

  “Great jugs,” Monroe corrected.

  “Either way, a zaftig woman,” Monoghan said.

  Blaney said nothing. He was kneeling beside the dead woman, his thumb and forefinger spreading her eyelids wide, his own violet-colored eyes studying her pupils. A few moments later, he declared her dead, said the probable cause of death was gunshot wounds, and ventured the wild guess that the lady had been shot twice in the heart.

  Same words the handyman had used.

  The lady.

  THE HANDYMAN TOLD THEM the lady’s name was Gloria Stanford. He told Meyer and Carella what he’d already told the Homicide dicks. He’d come up to change a washer in the kitchen faucet and had found the lady dead on the bedroom floor.

  “What were you doing in the bedroom?” Meyer wanted to know.

  “Señor?”

  “If you came up to change a washer in the kitchen, what were you doing in the bedroom?”

  “I alwayss check the apar’menn, make sure anybody’s home.”

  “So you went into the bedroom to see if the lady was in there, is that right?”

  “Sí. Before I begin work.”

  “And what if the lady’d been in bed or something?” Meyer asked.

  “Oh no. It wass eleven o’clock. She hass to be gone by then, no?”

  “Then why’d you go look in the bedroom for her?”

  “To see if she wass there,” the handyman said, and shrugged elaborately.

  “This guy sounds like my Chinese manager,” Monoghan said.

  “What’d you do when you found her in here dead?” Carella asked.

  “I run down get the super.”

  “He’s the one called it in,” Monroe said. “The super.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “You got me. Probably hiding in the basement, keeping his nose clean.”

  The boys from the mobile crime lab were just arriving.

  It was going to be a long day.

  ALONG ABOUT THREE-THIRTY every afternoon, the squadroom’s often frantic boil dissipated, to be replaced by a more relaxed ambience. The shift would be relieved in fifteen minutes, and usually all the clerical odds and ends were tied up by now. This was a time to unwind, to relax a little before heading home. This was a time to enter the mental decompression chamber that separated the often ugly aspects of police work from the more civilized world of family and friends.

  Meyer and Carella had jointly composed the Detective Division report on Gloria Stanford, the woman who’d been found dead this morning in a fourteenth-floor apartment on Silvermine Oval, an area that passed for the precinct’s Gold Coast. One copy of this DD report would go to Homicide, another would go to the Chief of De
tectives, and the third would be filed here. Meyer was on the phone with his wife, Sarah, discussing the bar mitzvah of his nephew Irwin’s second son—my how the time does fly when you’re having a good time; it seemed like only yesterday that they’d attended Irwin the Vermin’s own bar mitzvah. But Irwin was a grown man now—albeit a lawyer, so perhaps the sobriquet still applied.

  Carella was on the phone with his sister, Angela. She had just told him he was a cad. Not in those words, exactly. What she’d actually said was “Sometimes you behave like a spoiled brat.”

  This from his kid sister.

  Not such a kid anymore, either.

  All grown up, divorced once, and about to marry the district attorney who’d let their father’s killer escape justice. Or so it seemed to Carella. Which was probably why his sister expressed the opinion that he sometimes behaved like a spoiled brat.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said into the phone, unconsciously lowering his voice to a whisper because a squadroom was not particularly the most private place in the world.

  “What you said to Mama,” Angela said.

  She was referring to dinner at their mother’s house yesterday. Carella felt like telling her that what had made that Memorial Day memorable for a woman named Gloria Stanford was getting shot twice in the chest, with both bullets passing through her heart, and that this morning, he had looked down into that woman’s dead eyes, staring up at him wide open before the ME gently lowered her lids. He wanted to tell her that it had been a long, tiring day, and that he had just finished typing up the details of the case, and was ready to call home to tell Teddy he’d be on the way in fifteen—he glanced up at the wall clock—make that thirteen minutes, and he didn’t need a scolding just now from his kid sister, was what he felt like telling her.

  Instead, he said, “I told Mama I was very happy. In fact, I told both of you…”

  “It was your tone,” Angela said.

  “My what?”

  “The tone of your voice.”

  “I meant what I said. I’m very happy Mama is getting married so soon after Papa got killed, and I’m very happy you’re…”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. That sarcastic, sardonic tone of voice.”

  “I did not mean to sound either sarcastic or sardonic. You’re both getting married, and I’m very happy for you.”

  “You still think Henry ran a shoddy trial.”

  “No, I think he did his best to convict Papa’s murderer. I just think the defense outfoxed him.”

  “And you still hold that against him.”

  “Sonny Cole is dead,” Carella said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Then why do you keep harping on it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why do you keep behaving as if I shouldn’t marry Henry, and Mama shouldn’t marry Luigi?”

  “I wish he’d change his name to Lou,” Carella said.

  “That’s just what I mean.”

  “And I wish he’d move here instead of taking Mama with him to Italy.”

  “His business is in Italy.”

  “And mine is here.”

  “You’re not the one marrying Mama!” Angela said.

  “That’s true,” Carella said. “I’m not the one marrying Henry Lowell, either.”

  There was a long silence on the line. In the background, Carella could hear the voices of the other detectives in the squadroom, all of them on their own phones, at their own desks.

  At last, Angela said, “Get over it, Steve.”

  “I’m over it,” he said. “You’re both getting married on June twelfth. I’m giving both of you away. Period.”

  “You even make that sound ominous. Giving us away. You make it sound so final. And yes, ominous.”

  “Sis,” he said, “I love you both. You get over it, okay?”

  “Do you really?” Angela asked. “Love us both?”

  “With all my heart,” he said.

  “Do you remember when you used to call me ‘Slip’?” she asked.

  “How could I forget?”

  “I was thirteen. You told me a thirteen-year-old girl shouldn’t still be wearing cotton slips.”

  “I was right.”

  “You gave me an inferiority complex.”

  “I gave you an insight into the mysterious ways of womanhood.”

  “Yeah, bullshit,” Angela said, but he could swear she was smiling.

  “I love you, bro,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” he said, “I have to get out of here. Talk to you later.”

  “Give my love to Teddy and the kids.”

  “I will,” he said. “Bye, sweetie.”

  He pressed the receiver rest button, waited for a dial tone, and then began dialing home.

  A RELATIONSHIP CAN settle down into a sort of complacency, you know. You forget the early passion, you forget the heat, you begin to feel comfortable in another sort of intimacy that has nothing to do with sex. Or if it does, it’s only because the idea of being loved so completely, of loving someone back so completely, is in itself often sexually exciting. This profound concept did not cross the minds of either Bert Kling or Sharyn Cooke as they spoke on the telephone at eighteen minutes to four that afternoon. They simply felt snug and cozy with each other, sharing their thoughts as their separate days wound down in separate parts of the city.

  Sharyn worked in the police department’s Chief Surgeon’s Office at 24 Rankin Plaza, over the bridge in Majesta. As the city’s only female Deputy Chief, she was also its only black one. A board-certified surgeon with four years of medical school, plus five years of residency as a surgeon, plus four years as the hospital’s chief resident, she now earned almost five times as much as Kling did. Today, one of the cops she’d seen on a follow-up had been shot in the face at a street demonstration six months earlier. Blinded in the left eye, he was now fully recovered and wanted to go back to active duty. She had recommended psychiatric consultation first: a seriously wounded cop is often thought of as a jinx by his fellow officers, who sometimes tended to shun him. She told this to Kling now.

  “I’m seriously wounded, too,” he said.

  “Oh? How’s that, hon?”

  “We’ve been on the phone for five minutes, and you haven’t yet told me you love me.”

  “But I adore you!” she said.

  “It’s too late to apologize,” he said.

  “Where do you want to eat tonight?”

  “You pick it, Shar.”

  “There’s a place up in Diamondback serves real down-home soul food. Want to try it?”

  “Wherever.”

  “Such enthusiasm,” she said.

  “I’m not very hungry. Cotton and I were working a burglary over on Mason, we stopped for a couple of late pizzas afterward.”

  “Shall we just order in?”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Law and Order is on tonight, you know.”

  “Law and Order is on every night,” she said.

  “I thought you liked Law and Order.”

  “I adore Law and Order.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” he said. “You say you adore me, but you also adore Law and Order.”

  “Ahh, yes, but I love you,” she said.

  “At last,” he said.

  Not exactly hot and heavy.

  But they’d been living together for quite a while now.

  And neither of them ever once thought trouble might be heading their way.

  Had they but known.

  THIS WAS STILL the early days of their relationship. Everything was still whispers and heavy breathing. Innuendos. Promises. Wild expectations. Covert glances around the room to see if the phone conversation was being overhead. Hand cupped over the mouthpiece. Everything hot and heavy.

  Honey Blair was in a large, open room at Channel Four News, sitting at a carrel desk, her back to the three other people, two men and a woman, occupying the room at the moment. What they were doing was frantically c
ompiling some last-minute news segments that would go on the air at six P.M. Honey was telling Hawes that before she saw him tonight, she would have to run downtown to do a remote from the Lower Quarter, where some guy had jumped out the window of a twenty-first-floor office. She’d be heading out in half an hour or so.

  “I can’t wait,” she whispered into the phone.

  “To scrape your jumper off the sidewalk?” Hawes asked.

  “Yes, that, too. But, actually…”

  She lowered her voice even further.

  “…I can’t wait to jump on you!”

  “Careful,” he warned, and glanced around to where the other detectives all seemed preoccupied with their own phone conversations.

  “Tell me what you can’t wait to do,” she whispered.

  “I’d get arrested,” he whispered.

  “You’re a cop, tell me, anyway.”

  “Do you know that little restaurant we went to the other night?”

  “Y-e-ess?”

  “That very crowded place where everyone turned to look at you when we walked in…?”

  “Flatterer.”

  “It’s true. Because you’re so beautiful.”

  “Don’t stop, sweet talker.”

  “I want you…”

  “I want you, too.”

  “I’m not finished,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I want you to go to the ladies room…”

  “Right now?”

  “No, in that restaurant.”

  “Y-e-ess?”

  “And take off your panties…”

  “Oooo.”

  “And bring them back to the table and stuff them in the breast pocket of my jacket.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you’ll be sitting there in that crowded room with everyone knowing you’re Honey Blair from Channel Four News…”

  “Honey Blair, Girl Reporter.”

  “Yes, but I’ll be the only one who knows you’re not wearing panties.”

  “Even though they’re sticking out of your jacket pocket like a handkerchief?”

  “Even though,” he said.