“Very,” Bill said, looking at Wilmot.
“No prints on the knife,” Rothman said. “We got that far. Prints all over everything else. Been a lot of people around recently. Looks as if—”
“He had a party last night, captain,” one of the precinct detectives said. He had just come in from the foyer. He had waited. “Maybe twenty-thirty people here. Two from an apartment in the building. Name—” he checked his notebook—“name of North,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. Gerald.”
“Right,” Bill said. He was not surprised. Rothman raised eyebrows at him.
“You’ll be in charge, lieutenant?” the assistant district attorney said. “Of your side, I mean, of course.”
“Inspector O’Malley,” Weigand told him. “You know that, counsellor.”
“Oh,” the attorney said. “Sure. Well, get us something, lieutenant.”
“Captain,” Mullins told him. “Captain, counsellor.”
“All right, Mullins,” Weigand said, but his lips twitched toward a smile. “We’ll do what we can, counsellor.”
The assistant district attorney went toward the door. The detective from the District Attorney’s Homicide Bureau went with him.
“Sometimes,” Rothman said. Bill Weigand said, “Right.”
“You start with the squeal?” Rothman said. It was rhetorical—the police department started everywhere, with photographs, with fingerprints, with the patient work of a score of men, if necessary of a hundred men. It started with laboratory reports, and interviews, and searches into the past. It started everywhere. But it started also with the “squeal,” which was to say the complaint, which was to say Pamela North.
The photographers were packing up. The sketch artist looked at his work, looked at the room, changed a line. He checked a measurement. The fingerprint men had worked their way into another room. All this went on without the need of direction; it had begun when Weigand, hearing Pam North’s receiver cradled, had waited a moment and made the first of several calls which started the machinery. Much more would go on, now the starter had been pressed.
“Come on, sergeant,” Bill Weigand said.
They went down in the elevator to the fourth floor. They went to a door which was familiar and pressed a doorbell.
“Hello, squeal,” Bill Weigand said to Pamela North. “This time you found quite a body.”
He and Mullins went in.
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