Ten Plus One Read online

  “I think the photographer’s through,” Carella said.

  “You need us?” Monroe asked.

  “I don’t think so. I’ll send you a copy of the report.”

  “You know what you should do?” Monroe said.

  “What?”

  “Dress up that big redhead you got up there, what’s his name?”

  “Cotton Hawes?”

  “Yeah, him. Dress him up like a little old lady. Maybe your sniper’ll take a crack at him.”

  “He seems to favor middle-aged men,” Carella said.

  Monoghan turned to look at the corpse. “He can’t be more than forty,” he said, slightly miffed. “Since when is forty middle-aged?”

  “Mature, I meant,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, that’s better,” Monoghan answered. “Send us two copies, we got a new regulation.”

  “Come on, have a heart,” Carella said.

  “Do I make the regulations?”

  “You mean you don’t?” Carella said, looking surprised.

  “There he goes again. See what I mean? You could wet your pants laughing. Send the two copies, Carella. See who gets the last laugh.”

  “You think maybe the Greek guy did it?” Carella asked.

  “What Greek guy?”

  “I don’t know, the one Monroe was talking about.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Monoghan said. “A guy who’d sleep with his own mother is capable of anything.”

  Smiling, Carella walked to where the photographer was packing his equipment. “You all finished here?” he asked.

  “Be my guest,” the photographer said.

  “I’ll want some of those pictures.”

  “Sure. What precinct is this, anyway?”

  “The Eight-Seven.”

  “Right,” the photographer said. “And your name?”

  “Carella. Steve Carella.”

  “You’ll have them tomorrow.” He glanced at the sedan that pulled to the curb and then grinned and said, “Uh-oh.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The lab boys. Now you’ll have to wait till they get through.”

  “All I want to do is find out who the hell the guy is,” Carella said, and then he turned toward the two technicians who stepped out of the automobile.

  He had found out who the hell the guy was by going through his wallet, and now the hard part lay ahead.

  The guy was Anthony Forrest, and his driver’s license gave his address as 301 Morrison Drive, his height as five feet eight inches, and his eyes as blue. He carried six credit cards, all made out to Anthony Forrest: the Diner’s Club, American Express, Carte Blanche, the Gulf Oil Corporation, the Mobil Oil Company, and a card for one of the men’s department stores in the city. He also carried a business card that repeated his name, Anthony Forrest, and gave the name of his firm, Indian Exports, Inc., and the address, 580 Culver Avenue, which happened to be the address of the building in front of which he’d been shot and killed. The business card also gave him a title, which was vice president, and a phone number for the company, Frederick 7-4100. There were assorted other cards and scraps of paper in his wallet, and a $5 bill folded into his driver’s license, apparently there as insurance against traffic tickets. There were $70 in cash in the wallet, three twenties, the five, and five singles.

  Carella found the photographs in the gatefold.

  The woman was perhaps thirty-five years old, with bright youthful eyes and light hair. She smiled happily up at him through the celluloid case. There were pictures of three different children, all with the woman’s light hair and light eyes, two boys and a girl. The boys were wearing Cub Scout uniforms. One seemed to be slightly older than the other, but neither one was more than ten or eleven. The girl was perhaps fifteen or sixteen. The picture of her had been taken at a beach someplace. She was holding a large, striped beach ball and grinning over its top. Forrest himself stood behind her, grinning like a teenager, holding up two fingers behind her head so that they resembled horns.

  Carella sighed and closed the wallet.

  There is a quaint police regulation that requires corpses to be identified, and it is usually a blood relative who makes the positive identification, thereby enabling the police to know they are looking for the murderer of John Smith rather than the murderer of John Doe. The pictures in the wallet seemed to indicate that Forrest had a wife and three children, and it now remained for somebody to go to his home, wait for his door to open, face that wife and those children, and tell them that Anthony Forrest, husband, father, loved one, was stone cold dead.

  The somebody was Steve Carella.

  The girl who opened the door at 301 Morrison was the same girl Carella had seen grinning over the top of the beach ball in the photograph. The picture, though, had obviously been taken some years before, because the girl seemed to be at least nineteen or twenty. Her hair didn’t seem as blonde, either, but there was the same lively inquiry in her blue eyes, and she smiled at Carella in polite confusion and said, “Yes? May I help you?”

  “Miss Forrest?” Carella asked.

  “Yes?” she said, more confused now, the blonde eyebrows rising ever so slightly on her forehead.

  “I’m Detective Carella of the 87th Precinct,” Carella said. He paused, obligingly showed his shield and his ID card, and then cleared his throat. The girl waited. “May I speak to your mother, please?”

  “She’s not in,” the girl said.

  “Do you know where I can reach her?”

  “She went to meet my father for dinner,” the girl said. “Why?”

  “Oh,” Carella said, and suddenly the girl got the message. Up to that moment she had been only puzzled by his appearance, but something in the way he said the word “Oh” triggered alarm in her, and her eyes opened wide, and she took a short, quick step toward him and said, “What is it?”

  “May I come in, please?”

  “Yes, certainly,” the girl said, but they did not move farther into the house than the entrance foyer. “What is it?” she said. “What happened?”

  “Miss…” Carella said, and he hesitated, wondering if he should tell her, wondering if she was old enough to hear this, and yet realizing he had to locate her mother, had to inform someone.

  “Do you know where your mother went? Where she was going to meet him?”

  “Yes, Schrafft’s. I don’t know if they were going to have dinner there, but that’s where they were meeting. Look, will you please tell me what this is about?”

  Carella looked at her for what seemed like a very long time. Then, very gently, he said, “Miss, your father is dead.”

  The girl backed away from him. She stared at him a moment, and then smiled curiously, and then the smile dropped from her mouth, and she shook her head once, briefly, and said, “No.”

  “I’m sorry, miss.”

  “There must be some mistake. He was meeting my mother for—”

  “I don’t think there’s any mistake, miss.”

  “Well…well…how do you know? I mean…for God’s sake, what happened?”

  “He was shot.”

  “My father?” she asked incredulously. She shook her head again. “Shot? Are you joking or something?”

  “I’m sorry, miss, I’m not joking. I’d like to contact your mother. May I use your phone?”

  “Look…look…what you said is…is impossible, don’t you see? My father’s name is Anthony Forrest. Now, I’m sure you’ve…”

  Carella touched her arm gently. “Miss,” he said, “the man was carrying identification. We’re reasonably certain he was your father.”

  “What sort of identification?”

  “A wallet.”

  “Then someone must have stolen it from him,” the girl said. “That happens all the time, you know. And the man who got shot was undoubtedly carrying my father’s stolen wallet, so naturally you assumed…”

  “Who is it, Cindy?” a boy’s voice yelled from somewhere upstairs.

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p; “It’s nothing, Jeff. It’s all right,” she answered.

  “I’d like to call your mother,” Carella said.

  “Why? So you can alarm her unnecessarily, too?”

  Carella did not answer. He stared at the girl in silence. Tears were gathering behind her eyes; he could see them gathering, but she held on tightly for several moments and then said, “Go ahead, call. But…you better be right, you hear me? That man better be my father. Because…you…you just better not be making any mistake.” The tears were standing in her eyes now, an opaque film over the clear blue. “The phone’s in here.” she said. As he followed her into the living room, she added, “I’m sure he’s not my father.” A small laugh caught in her throat. “What would my father be doing getting…getting shot?”

  Carella picked up the phone book and looked up the number of the Schrafft’s restaurant closest to Forrest’s business office. He was starting to dial when the girl touched his hand.

  “Listen,” she said.

  He looked up.

  “Listen,” she said, and the tears suddenly began rolling down her face uncontrollably, “she’s not a very strong woman. Please…when you tell her…please do it gently? Please? When you tell her my father is dead? Please?”

  Carella nodded and began dialing the number.

  Clara Forrest was thirty-nine years old, a slender woman with a network of tiny wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth. She accompanied Carella into the mortuary silently, her face fixed in that curiously tight, almost angry expression people assume when they are told death has arrived. While the attendant pulled out the drawer on its oiled rollers, she stood by silently and then looked silently into the face of her husband, and nodded only once. She had accepted the knowledge the moment Carella revealed it on the telephone. This now, this looking into the face of the man she had married when she was nineteen, the man she had loved since she was seventeen, the man for whom she had borne three children, the man she had seen through bad times and good, this now, this looking into the dead and sightless face of a man who was now a corpse on an oiled drawer in a mortuary, this was only routine. The heartache had started the moment Carella spoke the words to her, and the rest was only routine.

  “Is that your husband, Mrs. Forrest?” Carella asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And his name is Anthony Forrest?”

  “Yes.” Clara shook her head. “Can we get out of here, please?”

  They walked out of the big, echoing room and stood outside in the hospital corridor.

  “Will they do an autopsy?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mrs. Forrest.”

  “I wish they wouldn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you think it was painful for him?”

  “He probably died instantly, Mrs. Forrest.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  There was a long silence.

  “We have clocks,” Clara said. “Oh, maybe two dozen of them. I knew this would happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He always wound the clocks. Some of them are very complicated. The older ones. And some of the tricky foreign ones. He used to wind them every week, on Saturday, all the clocks.” She paused and smiled tiredly. “I was always so afraid this would happen. You see, he…I never learned how to wind them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carella said.

  “Now…now that Tony’s gone,” she said dully, “who’ll wind the clocks?”

  And then she began weeping.

  The police department is a vast organization, and a detective is only an organization man. He goes to his office each day, and he conducts his business. And, as with any other business, there are company rules and company procedures, and papers to be typed and dictated, and phone calls to be made, and people to be interviewed and visited, and facts to be researched, and other branches of the organization to contact, and specialists to be consulted. And, as with any other business, it is impossible in police work to devote one’s full energies to a single pressing matter. There are always calls about something else, there are always unrelated people to see, there are conflicting vacation schedules and shortages of personnel, and overlapping and backslipping, and plain weariness.

  Being a detective is something like being an account executive.

  There is only one substantial difference, and once the mental adjustment is made, the difference becomes negligible.

  An account executive, despite the cutthroat notoriety of his profession, rarely has to look death in the face, and certainly does not have to look it in the face daily.

  A detective sees death in all its various forms at least five times a week, and usually more often. He sees it in the street in its elemental form, the slow disintegration of boys and girls, men and women, exposed to the rotting decay of the slums, dying bit by bit, having the life sucked out of them by the relentless city. He sees it more viciously in the junkies, a death that exists only by its negation of life, the slow suffocation of all will, the gradual extinction of any drive save the drive toward heroin. He sees it in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars. He sees it in the whores who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives fifty times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations. He sees it in the homosexuals, who have watched their manhood die, and who live a desperate dying life in the shadow of the law. He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear.

  And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands. He sees gunshot wounds and stab wounds and hatchet wounds and ice-pick wounds and mutilations and eviscerations. And each time, each time he looks at another human body that has been killed and nullified, he is yanked out of his own body, loses his own humanity to become an observer, a visitor from somewhere far in space studying a curious race of insect people who rip each other apart, who tear each other limb from limb and drink each other’s blood; he stands appalled, a civilized human who momentarily renounces his citizenship, unable to believe such cruelty can exist in men who have almost reached the stars. And then he blinks his eyes shut, and he opens them again, and there is only a case lying on the pavement, and he is only an organization man, and there are facts to be dug for and information to be had, before this one can be filed away with all the rest.

  The ballistics report informed Carella that the bullet dug from the wooden runner of the doors behind Forrest and the discharged shell found on the rooftop of the building across the way were separate parts of a .308-caliber Remington cartridge. The report also stated that the .308 had a full metal case, with a copper-jacketed bullet that had six lands and grooves, a soft point, a right twist, and weighed 191.6 grains. It was suggested that Forrest’s murderer must have used a telescopic sight, the distance from the roof to the sidewalk where Forrest was standing being something over 150 yards.

  Carella studied the report, and then behaved like a man who had not been in this business for a long, long time. He ignored the nagging premonition that had begun the moment he looked down at the dead man, in the hope that if he ignored it, it would go away, thereby making the case easier to cope with. He had caught the squeal, and so the case was officially his. The men of the 87th rarely worked with a fixed partner, rather sharing the caseload in a haphazard but effective manner, delegating duty to whoever had time or energy to spare. It was only April, but Meyer Meyer was just returning from his vacation to replace Bert Kling, who was leaving on his. The early vacations were the lieutenant’s idea; gang violence and crime in general seemed to enjoy an upswing during the summer months, and he wanted his full squad on duty during July and August. Cotton Hawes and Hal Willis were desperately trying to crack a series of warehouse robberies, Andy Parker was working on a jewelry holdup, and Arthur Brown was worki
ng with the Narcotics Squad in an attempt to flush out a known pusher hiding in the precinct. There were sixteen detectives on the squad, and Carella had worked with them all at one time or another, but he enjoyed working with Meyer Meyer and was happy when the lieutenant assigned him to the case.

  Meyer, oddly, fell immediately into the pattern Carella had set. He, too, blatantly ignored something that was staring them both in the face. He seemed inordinately glad to discover that they knew who the victim was, where his family lived, and what kind of bullet had killed him. They had often begun cases without the faintest idea of the victim’s name or address, without a single clue to his family or friends.

  They told each other they were looking for a specific human being who had slain another specific human being. They knew very well that it was impossible to crack every murder case that came their way, but they also knew that the proper amount of patience and legwork, coupled with the right questions posed to the right people, usually brought about the desired results. A man, they told themselves, doesn’t get killed unless someone feels he should be killed.

  They changed their minds the very next day.

  It was another glorious spring day.

  It is almost impossible for the country dweller to understand what such a day can mean to the person living in the city. The city citizen has avidly listened to the television weather reports the night before, and now the first thing he does when he awakens to the jangling of the alarm clock is to walk warily to the window and peer up at the sky. He feels a first real awakening thrill if the sky is blue. He knows immediately that this is going to be a day when nothing can go wrong, and then—winter or summer, spring or fall—he will open the window to test the temperature of the air, basing his wardrobe, his attitude, his entire philosophy of life, on the findings he makes in those few first wakeful moments.

  Randolph Norden heard the clock radio go on at 7:30 A.M. He had bought the clock radio because he figured it would be nice to awaken to music each morning. But his usual rising time was 7:30, news time, and each and every morning he was awakened by the sound of an announcer giving the latest bad news about Russia. He had tried setting the clock radio for 7:35, at which time the news had given way to music, but he found that he needed those extra five minutes if he was to get to the office on time. He had also tried setting the clock radio for 7:25, but then he began resenting the loss of five minutes’ sleep. And so, each morning, Randolph Norden listened to the bad news on a clock radio he had bought to provide music. It was, to his way of thinking, another example of the unfairness of life.