The Big Bad City Read online

  Despite all this, there was a sort of familiar serenity.

  As Carella and Parker and Brown reeled off guideline chapter and verse to the two shooflies eager to earn points with the Mayor’s office by exposing yet more use of excessive force by yet another trio of brutal police officers …

  As Carella and Brown together typed up their Detective Division report in triplicate on the nine ballplayers still protesting innocence in separate interrogations although almost certainly one of them had been the shooter and Jabez Courtney nonetheless lay stone-cold dead on a stainless-steel table at the St. Mary Boniface Mortuary …

  As Parker kept complaining vociferously, first to the shooflies, and next to his fellow detectives, that the goddamn blues in Adam Four should have frisked the fat little bastard before cuffing him and bringing him up here for interrogation …

  As Meyer and Kling came in from the field where they’d been interrogating a pawnbroker about a burglar they’d nicknamed The Cookie Boy, real life imitating art once again in that every cheap thief in every crime novel, movie, or television show was colorfully nicknamed by either newspersons or cops, fiction copying reality, the fake then feeding the actual in endless cyclical rotation …

  “Leaves a platter of chocolate chip cookies just inside the front door,” Meyer told Brown.

  “Yeah?” Brown said, unimpressed.

  “Better than shitting in the vic’s shoes,” Parker said.

  “Which lots of them do,” Kling agreed.

  “You missed all the fun up here,” Carella said.

  “Looks like you’re still having fun,” Meyer said cheerfully.

  As telephones rang, and voices overlapped and intertwined, Carella became aware of the summer sounds of August filtering up through the screened and open windows of the squadroom. There was a stickball game in progress under the glow of the sidestreet lampposts. On Grover Avenue, he could hear the clopping of horses drawing carriages into the park. Suddenly, there was the liquid trickle of a girl’s laughter. He did not know how long ago he’d read the story, nor could he calculate how many times it had been brought to mind on how many separate summer days. But hearing the girl’s lilting laughter, he thought again of Irwin Shaw’s girls in their flimsy summer frocks, and smiled knowingly. Yellow. The laughing girl somewhere on the street below would be wearing a yellow dress.

  Still smiling, he went to the wooden In-Out board—admittedly an old-fashioned way of tracking in this day and age of E-mail and computer technology, but still serviceable and accessible at a glance—and was about to move his hanging name tag from the In column to the Out column because finally, at ten minutes to nine on a long hot summer’s day—thirteen hours after he’d moved the tag in the opposite direction—he was ready to go home.

  The door to Lieutenant Byrnes’s office opened.

  “Steve? Artie?” he called. “Glad I caught you.”

  The dead girl lay sprawled in front of a bench in Grover Park, not seven blocks from the station house, on a gravel footpath only yards off Grover Avenue. She was wearing a white blouse and pale blue slacks, white socks and scuffed Reeboks. Flies were already buzzing around her. Not a sign of blood anywhere, but flies were already sipping at her wide-open eyes. Didn’t need a medical examiner to tell them she’d been strangled. The bruise marks on her throat corroborated their immediate surmise.

  “Touch anything?” Carella asked.

  “No, sir!” one of the blues answered, sounding offended.

  “This just the way you found her?” Brown asked.

  He was thinking he didn’t see a handbag anywhere around. Carella was thinking the same thing. The two men stood side by side in the dim light cast by a lamppost some five feet from the bench on the winding gravel path. Brown was the color of his name, six feet two inches tall and built like a cargo ship. Carella was a white man standing an even six feet tall and weighing a hundred and eighty-five in a good week. Summertime, with all the junk food, he usually shot up to a hundred-ninety, two hundred at the outside. The men had been working out of the Eight-Seven for a long time, partnered together more often than not. They could almost read each other’s minds.

  The assistant medical examiner arrived some five minutes later, complaining about summertime traffic, greeting the detectives, whom he’d met before at other crime scenes, and then getting to work while the blues stretched their yellow tapes and kept the forming crowd back. Nothing the residents of this city liked better than a good sidewalk show, especially in the summertime. Brown asked the blues how they’d come upon the body. The younger of the two uniformed cops said a female pedestrian had flagged their car and told them a woman was lying on the park path here, either sick or dead or something.

  “Did you detain her?” Brown asked.

  “Sure did, sir. She’s standing right over there.”

  “Did you talk to her?” Carella asked.

  “Few questions, is all.”

  “Did she see anyone?”

  “No, sir. Just walkin through the park, came upon the vic, sir.”

  Carella and Brown glanced over toward where a woman was standing under the light of the lamppost.

  “What’s her name?” Carella asked.

  “Susan … uh … just a second, it’s an Italian name,” he said, and took out his notebook. Anything ending in a vowel always threw them, Carella waited. “Androtti”, the officer said. “That’s a double t.”

  “Thanks,” Carella said, and looked over at the woman again. She seemed to be in her late forties or thereabouts, a tall, thin woman with her arms folded across her bosom, hugging herself as if trying to retain body warmth, though the temperature still hovered in the low eighties. The detectives walked over to her.

  “Miss Androtti?” Carella said.

  “Yes?”

  There was a stunned look on her face. It was not a pretty face to begin with, but the shock of having stumbled across a corpse had robbed it of all expression. They had seen this look before. They did not think Susan Androtti would sleep well tonight.

  “We have to ask you some questions, ma’am, we’re sorry,” Carella said.

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  Her voice was low, toneless.

  “Can you tell us what time you found the body, ma’am?”

  “It must’ve been eight o’clock or so,” she said. “It was so hot in the apartment, I came down for a walk.”

  “Here in the park,” Brown said.

  “Yes.”

  “Saw her lying there on the path, is that it?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know what it was at first. I thought it was … forgive me, I thought it was a bundle of clothes or something. Then I realized it was a woman.”

  “What’d you do then?”

  “I guess I screamed.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And ran out of the park, looking for a call box. A police call box. When I saw the patrol car, I flagged it down and showed the officers where the … the body was.”

  “Ma’am, when you came upon her, did you see anyone else in the vicinity?”

  “No. Just her.”

  “Hear anything in the vicinity?”

  “No.”

  “Any noise in the bushes …”

  “No.”

  “Sound of anyone running off …”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Where’d you enter the park, ma’am?”

  “At the transverse road on Larson.”

  “Meet anyone coming toward you on the path?”

  “No.”

  “See anyone going away from you on the path?”

  “No one.”

  “How long did it take you to walk from Larson to where you discovered the body?”

  “Five minutes? A little less?”

  “See anyone at all during that time?”

  “No one.”

  “Okay, miss, thank you,” Carella said.

  “We know this is upsetting,” Brown said.

  “It is.”

>   “We know.”

  “We have your address, we’ll contact you if we have any further questions,” Carella said. “Meanwhile, try to put it out of your mind.”

  “I will, thank you.”

  “Goodnight, miss,” Brown said.

  She did not move.

  “Miss?” Carella said.

  Still she did not move.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  Kept shaking it.

  “Miss?”

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  And he realized she’d been hugging herself to keep from trembling.

  “I’ll ask the officers to drive you home,”, he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” someone said, and they turned to see Monoghan and Monroe waddling toward the bench. In this city, the presence of Homicide Division detectives was mandatory at the scene of any murder or suicide. Even though the actual case belonged to the precinct detectives catching the squeal, Homicide was always there in a supervisory and advisory capacity. Didn’t used to be that way in the old days, when Homicide cops were considered elite and precinct detectives were thought of as mere general practitioners in a world of police department specialists. But that was then and this was now, and in today’s Cop Land the arrival of Homicide detectives was greeted without enthusiasm by the precinct cops actually working the case. The ME had his stethoscope inside the dead girl’s blouse now. Monoghan looked somehow offended. So did Monroe.

  “What is she, eighteen?” he said.

  “Nineteen?” Monoghan said.

  “Barbarian takeover,” Monroe said, and glanced at the girl’s face. “What do you think, Doc?”

  “My immediate guess is strangulation,” the ME said.

  “Was she raped?” Monroe asked.

  “Can’t tell you that till we get her downtown.”

  “Guys who strangle teenagers usually rape them first,” Monroe said. “Hello, Carella.”

  “Hello,” Carella said.

  Brown noticed that neither of the Homicide detectives ever said hello to him, but maybe he was being overly sensitive. “Has that been your experience?” he asked. “That strangled teenagers are usually rape victims as well?”

  “That has been my experience, yes,” Monroe said. “Most strangled teenagers have been violated first.”

  “Violated, huh?”

  “Violated, yes.”

  “How many strangled-teenager cases have you investigated?” Brown asked.

  Carella tried to keep from smiling.

  “A few in my time, kiddo,” Monroe said.

  “Nothing’s hard and fast in homicide cases, of course,” Monoghan said, defending his partner. “But as a general rule, you can say strangled teenagers have usually been violated first.”

  “Be interesting to find out,” the ME murmured, almost to himself. “Besides, she looks older.”

  “I’d appreciate your letting us know,” Monroe said.

  “How old would you say?” Monoghan asked.

  “In her twenties, easily,” the ME said.

  The two Homicide detectives were wearing black on this hot summer night, black being the color of death and therefore their color of choice. Black was the traditional color of all Homicide detectives in this city. Black suits and black hats. In this city, the Homicide detectives needed only sunglasses to make them look like the Blues Brothers. Or like the two alien-chasers in the movie Men in Black. But one of those two had been black, and Brown had never seen a black Homicide cop in his life, except on television. He wondered how these dressed-in-black, lily-white guys felt, drawing down salaries for virtually nonexistent jobs. Supervisory and advisory, my ass, he thought. This was featherbedding of the highest order. Worst part of it was, they earned more than either he or Carella did. And it still rankled that they never said hello.

  “Any witnesses to this?” Monroe asked.

  “No,” Carella said.

  “How’d she happen to turn up?” Monoghan asked.

  “Woman out for a stroll found her.”

  “Talk to the woman?”

  “Few minutes ago. Saw no one, heard no one.”

  “Any idea who she is?”

  “Her name is Susan Androtti.”

  “The dead girl?”

  “No, the woman who …”

  “I meant the girl.”

  “No ID that we could see. You find anything?” he asked the ME.

  “Like what?” the ME said, looking up.

  “Anything around her neck, or her wrists? Any kind of identification at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jane Doe,” Brown said.

  “Mrs. Jane Doe,” Monroe said. “That’s a wedding band, isn’t it?”

  The men all looked down at the slender gold band on the third finger of her left hand.

  “Child bride,” Monroe said.

  “Nice knockers on her, though,” Monoghan couldn’t help observing.

  “You got this?” Monroe asked.

  “We’ve got it.”

  “Send us copies.”

  “In triplicate.”

  Brown wondered if they’d say goodbye to him.

  “So long, Carella,” Monroe said.

  Monoghan said nothing. He followed his partner off, two black suits disappearing into the blackness of the night. The ME sighed, snapped his bag shut, and stood up. “I’m done here,” he said. “She’s yours.”

  “Okay to remove the wedding band?” Carella asked.

  “She’s no child bride,” the ME said, as if Monroe’s earlier remark had just registered. “Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  “Okay?” Carella asked again.

  “Sure, go right ahead.”

  “Tell the paramedics I’ll need a few minutes.”

  “Take your time,” the ME said, and walked toward where a man and a woman in hospital gear were leaning against the ambulance. There was the incessant chatter of invisible insects on the soft night air. Carella knelt beside the dead girl.

  Rings were often difficult to remove in the summertime, but this one came off with very little effort. He held it up to the light. There were three initials engraved inside the band: IHS.

  “She’s a nun,” he almost whispered.

  “Thing you got to remember,” Juju was saying, “is this man never gonna get you out of his mind.”

  “Mm-huh.”

  “I wouldn’t be sprised he the one set you up.”

  “You mean this time?”

  “I mean now, right here and now, set you up for the fall got you behine bars again, man.”

  “This is shit time,” Sonny said. “I be out of here soon’s my lawyer meets bail.”

  “And right back in again, long as this man’s on your case.”

  “I don’t think he had nothin to do with this one, Juje, I mean it. Wasn’t even his part of the city. This is a big city, man.”

  “Things happenin all over it, you right. But they have ways.”

  “What you mean, ways?”

  “Cop ways. They get on your case, they know where you are every minute of the day and night. This man’s on your case, Sonny.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “I’m tellin you. This man prolly thinks about you all the time. Can’t sleep from thinkin about you. Man, you offed his papa. He ain’t …”

  “Shhhh.”

  “He ain’t about to forget that,” Juju said, lowering his voice. “He ain’t about to forgive it neither.”

  The holding cells were noisy, really no need to whisper, wasn’t nobody goan hear them, anyway. This was nine-thirty at night, lights out would be at ten, everybody was still wide awake and clamoring for a lawyer, nothin closer to a zoo than a city jail. Sonny had been arrested earlier tonight for beating up a hooker called him nigger trash, herself black as a sewer. Funny thing was, he’d robbed a grocery store two nights before but nobody was bothering him about that cause nobody knew
he was the one done it. Instead, he was here on a bullshit assault charge, which would go away three, four months from now when it came to trial, he hoped. Or be dismissed even beforehand, who paid any attention to strung-out black hookers? Otherwise, there was a sister out there gonna rue the day she was born. Meanwhile, soon as his lawyer got here with the fuckin bail, he’d be out on the street again.

  “Another thing,” Juju said, “this man ain’t goan be satisfied juss lockin you up, man.”

  Juju was one of the people he’d met since he come to this city, funny how you ran into the same people in different lockups over and over again. It was a small community, really, what they called the criminal justice system. Some kind of justice when a two-bit whore could blow the whistle and they booked you for assault, hardly even touched the bitch. Might pay her a little visit even if this thing went up in smoke, teach her who she messin with here.

  “He coulda killed me,” Sonny said. “He had the chance.”

  “Who you talkin bout?”

  “The cop. Carella. You know. The one whose father.”

  “Coulda killed you?”

  “We was all alone in a dark hallway, man. Him, me, and another brother.”

  “What kinda brother?”

  “Another cop.”

  “A cop ain’t no brother, man, don’t kid yourself.”

  “Kept tellin him to do it. I can still hear him whisperin in that hallway. ‘Do it. We all alone here. Do it.’ ”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “Which is what makes me think he ain’t sweatin this.”

  “Man, you kill my father, I be sweatin it day and night, believe me. Waitin for the chance to get at you.”

  “Then why didn’t he do it when he coulda?”

  “There was a witness there,” Juju said.

  “The witness was another cop, I tole you.”

  “Cops testify against other cops all the time.”

  “I don’t think he’s the kind to seek revenge,” Sonny said.

  “You’re positive about that, huh?”

  “I just don’t think he’s that kinda man.”

  “Mm-huh.”

  “Else he woulda done me when he coulda.”

  “Mm-huh.”

  “Is what I think,” Sonny said.

  “Long as you’re dead certain,” Juju said. “Cause if you ain’t, you goan have to look over your shoulder every step you take. He won’t let you breathe, man. He be after you, man. He be your nemesis. And when he fine you …”