Sadie When She Died Read online

  “I’m sorry it was painful,” Kling said. “Can the Department make amends by taking you to lunch?”

  “Would it be the Department or would it be you?”

  “Me, actually,” Kling said. “What do you say?”

  She had, Kling noticed, a direct approach to most matters, asking questions as guilelessly as a child, expecting honest answers in return. Without breaking her stride now, she turned her head toward him, long brown hair falling free over one eye, and said, “If it’s just lunch, fine.”

  “That’s all,” Kling said, and he smiled, but he could not hide his disappointment. He realized, of course, that he was still smarting from Cindy Forrest’s abrupt termination of their relationship, and a nice way for a man to prove he was still attractive to women was to sweep someone like Nora Simonov off her feet and into his arms before Cindy could even raise her eyebrows in astonishment. But Nora Simonov wasn’t having any, thanks. “If it’s just lunch, fine,” she had said, making it clear that she wasn’t looking for any more meaningful relationship. She had caught the tone of Kling’s reply, however, he knew that; her face was a direct barometer of her emotions, pressure-sensitive to every nuance of feeling within. She nibbled at her lip now, and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound so . . . terminal. It’s just that I am in love with someone, you see, and I didn’t want to give the impression that I might be, well, available, or interested, or . . . my God, I’m only screwing it up worse!”

  “No, you’re doing fine,” Kling said.

  “I normally detest people who wear their hearts on their sleeves. God, are they boring! Anyway, do we have to have lunch, I’m not even hungry yet. What time is it?”

  “A little after twelve.”

  “Couldn’t we walk a little and just talk? If we did, I wouldn’t feel I was compromising my grand amour,” she said, rolling her eyes, “and you wouldn’t feel you were wasting lunch on a completely unresponsive dud.”

  “I would love to walk and talk a little,” Kling said.

  They walked.

  The city that Thursday nine days before Christmas was overcast with menacing clouds; the weather bureau had promised a heavy snowfall before midafternoon. Moreover, a sharp wind was blowing in off the river, swirling in cruel eddies through the narrow streets of the financial district that bordered the municipal and federal courts. Nora walked with her head ducked against the wind, her fine brown hair whipping about her head with each fierce gust. As a defense against the wind, which truly seemed determined to blow her off the sidewalk, she took Kling’s arm as they walked, and on more than one occasion turned her face into his shoulder whenever the blasts became too violent. Kling began wishing she hadn’t already warned him off. As she chattered on about the weather and about how much she liked the look of the city just before Christmas, he entertained wild fantasies of male superiority: bold, handsome, witty, intelligent, sensitive cop pierces armor of young, desirable girl, stealing her away from ineffectual idiot she adores . . .

  “The people, too,” Nora said. “Something happens to them just before Christmas, they get, I don’t know, grander in spirit.”

  Young girl, in turn, realizing she has been waiting all these years for handsome witty, etc., cop lavishes adoration she had previously wasted on mealy-mouthed moron . . .

  “Even though I recognize it’s been brutalized and commercialized, it reaches me, it really does. And that’s surprising because I’m Jewish, you know. We never celebrated Christmas when I was a little girl.”

  “How old are you?” Kling asked.

  “Twenty-four. Are you Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “Kling,” Nora said, and shrugged. “It could be Jewish.”

  “Is your boyfriend Jewish?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Are you engaged?”

  “Not exactly. But we do plan to get married.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I’d rather not talk about him, if you don’t mind,” Nora said.

  They did not talk about him again that afternoon. They walked through streets aglow with lighted Christmas trees, passing shop windows hung with tinsel and wreaths. Streetcorner Santa Clauses jingled their bells and solicited donations; Salvation Army musicians blew their tubas and trombones, shook their tambourines, and likewise asked for funds; shoppers hurried from store to store clutching giftwrapped packages while overhead the clouds grew thicker and more menacing.

  Nora told him that she usually kept regular working hours in the studio she had set up in one room of her large, rent-controlled apartment. (“Except once a week, when I go up to Riverhead to visit my mother, which is where I was all day yesterday while you were trying to reach me”), and that she did many different kinds of freelance design, from book jackets to theatrical posters, from industrial brochures to line drawings for cookbooks, color illustrations for children’s books, and what-have-you. (“I’m usually kept very busy. It isn’t just the art work, you know, it’s running around to see editors and producers and authors and all sorts of people. I’ll be damned if I’ll give twenty-five percent of my income to an art agent. That’s what some of them are getting these days, don’t you think there should be a law?”) She had studied art at Cooper Union in New York City, and then had gone on for more training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then had come here a year ago to work for an advertising firm named Thadlow, Brunner, Growling and Crowe (“His name really was Growling, Anthony Growling”) where she had lasted for little more than six months, doing illustrations of cans and cigarette packages and other such rewarding subjects before she’d decided to quit and begin freelancing. (“So that’s the story of my life.”)

  It was almost three o’clock.

  Kling suspected he was already halfway in love with her, but it was time to get back to the squadroom. He took her uptown in a taxi, and just before she got out in front of her building on Silvermine Oval, on the off-chance that her earlier protestations of undying love were in the nature of a ploy, he said, “I enjoyed this, Nora. Can I see you again sometime?”

  She looked at him with an oddly puzzled expression, as though she had tried her best to make it abundantly clear that she was otherwise involved and had, through some dire fault of her own, failed to communicate the idea to him. She smiled briefly and sadly, shook her head, and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

  Then she got out of the taxi and was gone.

  Among Sarah Fletcher’s personal effects that were considered of interest to the police before they arrested Ralph Corwin was an address book found in the dead woman’s handbag on the bedroom dresser. In the Thursday afternoon stillness of the squadroom, Carella examined the book while Meyer and Kling discussed the potency of the copper bracelet Kling wore on his wrist. The squadroom was unusually quiet; a person could actually hear himself think. The typewriters were silent, the telephones were not ringing, there were no prisoners in the detention cage yelling their heads off about police brutality or human rights, and all the windows were tightly closed, shutting out even the noises of the street below. In deference to the calm (and also because Carella seemed so hard at work with Sarah Fletcher’s address book), Meyer and Kling spoke in what amounted to whispers.

  “I can only tell you,” Meyer said, “that the bracelet is supposed to work miracles. Now what else can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me how come it hasn’t worked any miracles on me so far?”

  “When did you put it on?” Meyer said.

  “I marked it on my calendar,” Kling said. They were sitting in the corner of the squadroom closest to the detention cage, Kling in a wooden chair behind his desk, Meyer perched on one end of the desk. The desk was against the wall, and the wall was covered with departmental flyers, memos on new rules and regulations, next year’s Detectives’ Duty Chart (listing Night Duty, Day Duty, and Open Days for each of the squad’s six detective teams), a cartoon clipped from the police magazine every red-blooded cop subscribed to, severa
l telephone numbers of complainants Kling hoped to get back to before his tour ended, a photograph of Cindy Forrest (which he’d meant to take down), and several less-flattering mug shots of wanted criminals. Kling’s calendar was buried under the morass on the wall; he had to take down an announcement for the P.B.A.’s annual New Year’s Eve party to get at it. “Here,” he said. “You gave me the bracelet on December first.”

  “And today’s what?” Meyer asked.

  “Today’s the sixteenth.”

  “How do you know I gave it to you on the first?”

  “That’s what the MB stands for. Meyer’s bracelet.”

  “All right, so that’s exactly two weeks. So what do you expect? I told you it’d begin working in two weeks.”

  “You said ten days.”

  “I said two weeks.”

  “Anyway, it’s more than two weeks.”

  “Listen, Bert, the bracelet works miracles, it can cure anything from arthritis to . . .”

  “Then why isn’t it working on me?”

  “What do you expect?” Meyer asked. “Miracles?”

  There was nothing terribly fascinating about the alphabetical listings in Sarah Fletcher’s address book. She had possessed a good handwriting, and the names, addresses, and telephone numbers were all clearly written and easily read. Even when she’d crossed out a telephone number to write in a new listing, the deletion was made with a single sure stroke of her pen, the new number written directly beneath it. Carella leafed through the pages, finding that most of the listings were for obviously married couples, (Chuck and Nancy Benton, Harold and Marie Spander, George and Ina Grossman, and on and on), some were for girlfriends, some for local merchants and service people, one for Sarah’s hairdresser, another for her dentist, several for doctors, and a few for restaurants in town and across the river. A thoroughly uninspiring address book—until Carella came to a page at the end of the book, with the printed word MEMORANDA at its top.

  “All I know,” Kling said, “is that my shoulder still hurts. I’m lucky I haven’t been in any fierce pistol duels lately, because I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to draw my gun.”

  “When’s the last time you were in a fierce pistol duel?” Meyer asked.

  “I’m in fierce pistol duels all the time,” Kling said, and grinned.

  Under the single word MEMORANDA there were five names, addresses, and telephone numbers written in Sarah’s meticulous hand. All of the names were men’s names. They had obviously been entered in the book at different times because some were written in pencil and others in ink. The parenthetical initials following each entry were all noted in felt marking pens of various colors:

  If there was one thing Carella loved, it was a code. He loved a code almost as much as he loved German measles.

  Sighing, he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out the Isola directory. He was verifying the address for the first name on Sarah Fletcher’s MEMORANDA list when Kling said, “There are some guys who won’t let a case go, even after it’s been solved.”

  “Who did you have in mind?” Meyer asked.

  “Certain very conscientious guys,” Kling said.

  Carella pretended neither of them was there. The telephone book address for Andrew Hart matched the one in Sarah’s handwriting. He flipped to the back of the directory.

  “I knew a very conscientious cop one time,” Meyer said, and winked.

  “Tell me about him,” Kling said, and winked back.

  “He was walking a beat out in Bethtown, oh, this must have been three or four winters ago,” Meyer said. “It was a bitter cold day, not unlike today, but he was a very conscientious man, this cop, and he walked his beat faithfully and well, without once taking a coffee break, or even stopping in any of the local bars for a nip.”

  “He sounds like a stalwart,” Kling said, grinning.

  Carella had found an address for Michael Thornton, the second name on Sarah’s list. It, too, was identical to the one in her book.

  “Oh, he was a stalwart, no question,” Meyer said. “And conscientious as the day was long. Did I mention it was a bitter cold day?”

  “Yes, I believe you did,” Kling said.

  “Nonetheless,” Meyer said, “it was the habit of a very pretty and well-built Bethtown lady to take a swim every day of the year, rain or shine, snow, hail, or sleet. Did I mention she had very big boobs?”

  “I believe you did.”

  Carella kept turning pages in the directory, checking names and addresses.

  “The lady’s house was right on the beach, and it was her habit to bathe stark naked because this was a very isolated part of Bethtown, way over near the end of the island. This was before they put the new bridge in, you still had to take a ferry to get out there. It so happened, however, that the lady’s house was also on the conscientious cop’s beat. And on this particularly bitter day some three or four winters ago, the lady rushed out of her back door with her arms crossed just below her big bulging boobs, hugging herself because it was so cold, and the conscientious cop . . .”

  “Yes, yes, what about him?” Kling said.

  “The conscientious cop took one look at that lady hugging herself as she ran down toward the water, and he yelled, ‘Stop, police!’ and when the lady stopped, and faced him, still clutching herself under those big boobs, she indignantly asked, ‘What have I done, officer? What crime have I committed?’ And the conscientious cop said, ‘It ain’t what you done, lady, it’s what you were about to do. You think I’m going to stand by while you drown those two chubby pink-nosed puppies?’”

  Kling burst out laughing. Meyer slapped the top of his desk and roared at his own joke. Carella said, “Will you guys please shut up?”

  He had verified all five addresses.

  In the morning, he would get to work.

  The letter was the sixth one April Carella had written to Santa Claus. In the kitchen of the Riverhead house, she read it silently over her mother’s shoulder:

  “What do you think, Mom?” she said.

  She was standing behind her mother’s chair, and Teddy could not see her lips, and had no idea that she had spoken. Teddy was a deaf mute, a beautiful woman with midnight hair and dark luminous brown eyes that cherished words because to her they were visible and tangible; she saw them forming as they tumbled from fingers; she touched them in the dark on her husband’s lips, and heard them more profoundly than she would have with normal “hearing.” She was thoroughly absorbed by the inconsistencies in her daughter’s letter, and did not look up as April came around the chair. Why someone should be able to spell a word like “personally” while making a shambles of simple words like “busy” or “would” was beyond Teddy’s comprehension. Perhaps she should visit April’s teacher, mildly suggest to her that whereas the child possessed undeniable writing ability, wouldn’t her style be more effective if her imaginative spelling were controlled somewhat? Some of the avant-garde quality might be lost, true . . .

  April touched her arm.

  Teddy looked up into her daughter’s face. The two, in the light of the Tiffany lamp that overhung the old oak table in the large kitchen, were something less than mirror images, but the resemblance, even for mother and daughter, was uncanny nonetheless. More remarkable, however, was the identical intensity of their expressions. As April repeated her question, Teddy studied her lips, and then raised her hands and slowly spelled out her answer, while April’s gaze never faltered. It occurred to Teddy, with some amusement, that a child who could not spell “would” might have difficulty deciphering the letters and words that Teddy deftly and fluidly formed with her fingers, especially when the message she was communicating was “Your spelling is bad.” But April watched, nodding as she caught letters, smiling as the letters combined to form a word, and then another word, and finally grasping the short sentence, and saying, “Which ones are spelled wrong, Mom? Show me?”

  They were going over the letter again when April heard a key in the front door. Her
eyes met briefly with her mother’s. A smile cracked instantly across her face. Together, they rose instantly from the table. Mark, April’s twin brother, was already bounding down the steps from his bedroom upstairs.

  Carella was home.

  7

  A t a little past eight the next morning, on the assumption that most men worked for a living and would be in transit to their jobs after that hour, Carella called Andrew Hart at the number listed in Sarah’s address book. The phone was picked up on the fifth ring.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice said.

  “Mr. Hart?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad. I wonder . . .”

  “What’s the matter?” Hart said immediately.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Hart.”

  “I’m in the middle of shaving,” Hart said. “I’ve got to leave for the office in a little while. What’s this about?”

  “We’re investigating a homicide, Mr. Hart . . .”

  “A what? A homicide?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who? Who’s been killed?”

  “A woman named Sarah Fletcher.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Sarah Fletcher,” Hart said.

  “She seems to have known you, Mr. Hart.”

  “Sarah who? Fletcher, did you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know anybody by that name. Who says she knew me? I never heard of her in my life.”

  “Your name’s in her address book.”

  “My what? My name? That’s impossible.”

  “Mr. Hart, I have her book right here in my hand, and your name is in it, together with your address and your phone number.”

  “Well, I don’t know how it got there.”

  “Neither do I. That’s why I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Okay, okay,” Hart said. “What time is it? Jesus, is it ten after eight already?”