by McBain, Ed
“I only want to know about this particular outage,” Carella said. “Lamppost number six, on the corner of Fourteenth and Harding. According to what we’ve got here, our patrolman reported a broken bulb and globe on the morning of Saturday, September sixth, and presumably the desk sergeant—”
“Yes, it was reported to us. I already told you it was reported.”
“Was it repaired?”
“I would have to check that.”
“Please check it,” Carella said. “I’m specifically interested in knowing whether it had been repaired by eleven o’clock that Saturday night.”
“Just a second.”
Carella waited.
When the man came back onto the line, he said, “Yes, that lamp was repaired at four fifty-seven P.M. on Saturday, September sixth.”
“It’s out again now,” Carella said.
“Well, so what? If you didn’t happen to know it, that lamp happens to be right outside an abandoned building that’s being torn down. You’re lucky we repaired the damn thing at all.”
“I’d like it repaired again,” Carella said. “We’re investigating a homicide here, and it’s important for us to know whether that streetlamp could have illuminated—”
“Well, shit, put your own emergency service on it.”
“No, I want it fixed the way the electric company would have fixed it. Your lightbulb, your globe.”
“Who’s this I’m talking to?”
“Detective Carella.”
“Paisan, have a heart, huh? I’m up to my ass in orders here. I’ll be lucky if I get through them by the Fourth of—”
“I need that lamp fixed,” Carella said. He looked up at the wall clock. “It’s a quarter past seven,” he said. “My partner and I are going out for a bite, we’ll be back at the scene there by eight, eight-thirty. I want it fixed by then.”
“You sure you’re Italian?” the man from the electric company said, and hung up.
Carella buzzed the desk sergeant, asked for Patrolman Shanahan’s home number, and immediately dialed it. Shanahan barked “Hello!” into the phone, and then immediately apologized when Carella identified himself. He said his sixteen-year-old daughter kept getting phone calls day and night from her girl-friends or from these pimply-faced jerks who kept coming to the house, man couldn’t get a moment’s peace, phone going like sixty all the time.
“So I’m sorry for snapping your head off,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Carella said. “There was just one thing I wanted to ask you. On Saturday night, when you found that girl’s body—”
“Damn shame,” Shanahan said.
“…would you remember whether the streetlamp was working?”
“Sure, it was working.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, I just know it was working. I automatically look for outages, know what I mean? I see a busted lamp, I fill out a report. But aside from that, I could see the girl’s hand. Up on the top step there, know what I mean? Now if the lamp had been out, it would’ve been blacker’n a witch’s asshole on that corner. Couldn’t have seen the hand, know what I mean? But I could see it. Laying palm up, right there outside the doorway. Didn’t put my flashlight on till after I’d climbed the steps. Threw my beam inside the doorway then and saw the body.”
“Did you see anything inside the hallway before you turned on your flash?”
“I could see the outline of the body, yes. I knew there was a body inside there, yes.”
“Okay, thanks a lot,” Carella said.
“Don’t mention it,” Shanahan said.
At a quarter past 8:00 that Monday night, Carella and Kling went back to Harding Avenue. The streetlamp was burning again. It cast a circle of light onto the sidewalk and into the gutter. The circle of light included the entire front stoop of the building in which Muriel Stark had been murdered. The detectives went into the hallway. The only light was the bounce from the lamp outside, but on the floor they could clearly make out the chalked outline of Muriel Stark’s body, and on the walls they could see scribbled graffiti and spatters they assumed were bloodstains. Standing against the wall opposite Kling, Carella could even distinguish the color of his eyes. There was no question but that the reflected light in that hallway was sufficient for identification. They had to believe that Patricia Lowery had indeed seen a dark-haired, blue-eyed man stabbing her cousin to death. This being the case, they further had to believe that she’d mistakenly identified Walt Lefferts only because he resembled the killer more closely than any of the other men in the lineup. They realized with dismay that Patricia’s value to them had been totally destroyed by this false identification. They were looking for a dark-haired, blue-eyed man who looked like Walt Lefferts, yes, but even if they found him, and even if Patricia pointed an accusing finger at him, how could they know for certain that he was the man she’d really seen committing the murder? She had also seen Walt Lefferts committing the murder, hadn’t she?
As far as they were concerned, they were still looking for someone Patricia had described—accurately, it now seemed—as “a perfect stranger.”
The kids knew somebody had been killed in that building on Saturday night, but this was Tuesday afternoon and the barricades the City Housing Authority had put up on either end of the block made the street perfect for stickball. It was still early September, and there’d be plenty of daylight before dinnertime. So they congregated at about 4:00, chose up their sides and chalked their bases onto the asphalt, and got down to the serious business at hand.
The boy playing center field was standing almost directly opposite the hallway in which Muriel Stark had been found. He wasn’t thinking about Muriel Stark, he didn’t even know Muriel Stark. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t thinking about murder or sex maniacs or anything but how hard and how far the batter on the other team would hit the rubber ball. They had two guys on base now, and a hit would put them ahead. This was a tense moment, much more important than who had got killed in the building on Saturday night, or who had done it. The boy saw the pitcher on his team wind up and fling the ball toward the other team’s batter. The ball bounced on the asphalt paving, came up toward the batter waist-high. The broomstick handle came around in a powerful swing, the narrow round of wood colliding with the rubber ball and sending it soaring over the pitcher’s head, and then the second baseman’s head, to bounce somewhere between second base and center field. The boy came running in, glove low. The ball was still bouncing, and he was running to meet it, the way he’d been taught—run to meet the ball, don’t wait for it to come to you. It took a bad hop some four feet from his glove, veered off to the right and rolled into the sewer at the curb.
“That’s only a double!” he shouted immediately. “That’s only a double, it went down the sewer.”
There was no argument, they all knew the rules. The batter grumbled a little about losing a sure homer, but rules were rules and the ball had rolled down the sewer and that made it an automatic double. They gathered around the sewer grating now, half a dozen of them. Two of them seized opposite sides of the grating, their hands reaching down to clasp the cast-iron crossbars, and they lifted the grating and moved it onto the pavement, and then the smallest boy in the group lowered himself into the sewer.
“You see it?” somebody asked.
“Yeah, it’s over there,” the boy answered.
“So get it already.”
“Just a second, I can’t reach the damn thing.”
“What’s that over there?” somebody else asked.
“Let me get the ball first, okay?”
“Over there. That shiny thing.”
They had found the murder weapon.
Or, to be more exact, they had found a knife near the scene of a murder, and they immediately turned it over to the police.
The blade of the knife was three and three-quarter inches long. It was a paring knife, with a pointed tip and a razor-sharp stainless-steel blade. Two stainless-steel rivets he
ld the blade fastened to the curved wooden handle, which was itself four and a half inches long. The overall length of the knife, from the end of the wooden handle to the pointed tip of the blade, was eight and a quarter inches. The rain had washed the blade clean of any blood, but blood had soaked into the wooden handle and stained it, and it was this that the laboratory reported on. There were two types of blood on the handle of the knife. O and A. Presumably Muriel’s and Patricia’s. And presumably the killer had first slain Muriel, and then slashed Patricia, and then—instead of pursuing her when she’d run away from the building—had come down the steps to the curb and thrown the murder weapon into the sewer.
There were no usable fingerprints on the handle of the knife.
The funeral took place on Wednesday afternoon.
From the funeral home on Twelfth and Ascot, the black limousines drove out to the cemetery on Sands Spit. There were six limousines, and behind them a row of family cars with their head-lights on, and behind those one of the 87th Precinct’s unmarked sedans. Carella was at the wheel, Kling was riding shotgun beside him. The day was one of those September miracles that made living in this part of the country almost worthwhile. The black cars moved slowly against a sky blown clear of clouds, utterly blue and dazzling with light. There was not the slightest trace of summer lingering on the air; the bite promised imminent autumn, threatened winter on the distant horizon.
At the cemetery, they walked from the cars to the open hole in the ground where the coffin was poised on canvas straps, waiting to be lowered hydraulically into the earth. A pair of gravediggers stood by silently, leaning on their shovels, hats in their hands. The Lowerys were Catholic, and the priest and clergy stood by the coffin now, waiting for the mourners to make their way along the gravel path to the burial site. Overhead, a pair of jays, blue against the bluer sky, cawed as though resenting intrusion. When the family and friends had gathered around the open grave, the priest sprinkled the coffin and the grave with holy water, and then incensed both, and said, in prayer, “Dearest brothers, let us faithfully and lovingly remember our sister, whom God has taken to himself from the trials of this world. Lord, have mercy.”
“Christ, have mercy,” the chanter of the first choir said.
“Lord, have mercy,” the second choir responded.
“Our Father,” the priest said, and sprinkled the coffin again, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation—”
“But deliver us from evil.”
“From the gate of hell.”
“Rescue her soul, O Lord.”
“May she rest in peace.”
“Amen.”
“O Lord, hear my prayer,” the priest said.
“And let my cry come to you.”
“The Lord be with you.”
“And with your spirit.”
“Let us pray,” the priest said. “O Lord, we implore you to grant this mercy to your dead servant, that she who held fast to your will by her intentions may not receive punishment in return for her deeds; so that, as the true faith united her with the throng of the faithful on earth, your mercy may unite her with the company of the choir of angels in heaven. Through Christ our Lord.”
“Amen.”
And then it was straight out of Hamlet.
Like some grief-stricken Laertes, he threw himself upon the coffin just as it was being lowered into the grave. Carella recognized him at once as the slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man whose photograph had been in Patricia Lowery’s wallet. He was identified by name in the next moment when a dark-haired woman standing alongside the grave shouted, “Andy, no!” and reached over to pull him from the descending casket. Someone shouted an order, the coffin stopped and hung trembling on canvas straps, the young man spread-eagled and sobbing on its shining black lid. The woman was tugging at his arm, trying to break his embrace on the long black box. “Get away from me, Mom!” he shouted, and a terrible keening moan sprang from his lips in the next moment, his arms hugging the casket, his head thrown back, his cry of inconsolable grief rising to frighten even the jays, who responded in terrified flapping clamor. A man broke from the crowd of mourners, the cast was being identified for Carella without benefit of program—Andrew Lowery on the coffin hanging suspended over the open grave, his mother, Mrs. Lowery, still tugging at his arm, and now a man whom Mrs. Lowery addressed as Frank, and to whom she immediately said, “Help me, your son’s gone crazy!” Mother, father, grief-stricken son, and Patricia Lowery standing by and watching her blood relatives with strangely detached eyes, as though they were somehow embarrassing her with their excessive display of emotion. For whereas Andrew Lowery may not have gone quite crazy, he was certainly putting on a fine show of what Hamlet might have called emphatic grief, his phrases of sorrow conjuring the wandering stars and making them stand like wonder-wounded hearers, so to speak. He was pounding on the coffin with his fists now, and shouting, “Muriel, wake up! Muriel, say you’re not dead! Muriel, I love you!” while his father and mother tried to pull him off the casket, fearful that he and it would tumble into the grave together, the priest hastily muttering a prayer for those resting in the cemetery (or at least trying to rest with all the noise Andrew Lowery was making), this time in Latin for the sake of any Roman spectators, “Oremus. Deus, cuius miseratione animae fidelium,” and so on.
For a moment Carella wondered whether he should step in and break up the near-riot at graveside. But finally Frank Lowery managed to pull his son off the coffin, and Mrs. Lowery clutched him to her in embrace and shouted, “We all loved her, oh, dear God, we all loved her!” and the priest concluded his Latin prayer with the words “Per eundem Christum, Dominum nostrum.” The gravediggers—who, like cops, had seen it all and heard it all—simply pressed the button that again sent the coffin descending and the soul hopefully ascending. The skies above were still as blue as though a jousting tournament were to take place that very afternoon, with banners and pennoncels flying, and shields ablaze with two lions gules on an azure field, and lovely maidens in long pointed hats with silken tassels and merry eyes—rather than eyes red with mourning, or squinched in embarrassment, or narrowed in pain.
“She came to live with us when her parents died,” Mrs. Lowery said. “She was fifteen at the time, they were both killed in an automobile accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike—my sister, Pauline, and my brother-in-law, Mike. Muriel came to live with us a month later. I never adopted her, but I was planning to. She always called me Aunt Lillian, but she was like a daughter to me. And certainly like a sister to Andy and Patricia.”
Lillian Lowery carried a bottle of whiskey to the kitchen table and set it down before the detectives. In the other room, her husband Frank was talking to well-wishers who had come back to the house after the funeral.
“I know you’re not allowed to drink on duty,” she said, “but I feel the need for one myself, and I’d appreciate it if you joined me.”
“Thank you,” Carella said.
She poured three shot glasses full to their brims. Carella and Kling waited for her to lift her glass, and then they lifted theirs as well. “Andy will miss her most,” Mrs. Lowery said, and tilted the glass, swallowing all the whiskey in it. Carella and Kling sipped at their drinks. When Carella put his glass down on the kitchen table, Kling put his down too. “They were really like brother and sister,” she said, pouring herself another shot from the bottle. “Except that brothers and sisters sometimes argue. Not Andy and Muriel.” She shook her head, lifted the glass, and downed the whiskey. “Never. I never heard a word of anger between them. Never even a raised voice. They got along beautifully. Well, you saw him at the cemetery, he was beside himself with grief. It’s going to take him a long time to get over this. He blames himself a little, I think.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Lowery?” Carella asked.
“Well, he was supposed to go with them to the par
ty, you know. At Paul’s house. Paul Gaddis. He’s one of Andy’s friends. It was his birthday they were celebrating that night. But then at the last minute, Andy got a call from the restaurant, asking if he could come in, so he went to work instead of the party. Even so, he could maybe have saved her, if only he’d been a few minutes earlier.”
“I’m not sure I understand you,” Carella said.
“Well, he went to pick up the girls.”
“Who did? Your son?”
“Yes. Andy.”
“If he was working—”
“Well, he called here from the restaurant and asked if they were home yet. This was about ten-fifteen. I told him they weren’t here, and he said he was through at the restaurant, there’d been a very small crowd for a Saturday night, and he thought he’d head over to Paul’s and pick them up. So I said fine. But what happened, you see, Andy went over to Paul’s house, and the girls had already left.” She shook her head, and poured herself another shot glass full of whiskey.
“Mrs. Lowery,” Carella said, “what did Andy do when he got to the party and found out the girls had gone?”
“He went looking for them.”
“In the street?”
“Yes. But it began raining again, and he thought they might have gone back to the party, so he went back there. But they weren’t there, so he went out looking for them again, and he still couldn’t find them. He got here alone at about twelve-fifteen, which is when I called the police. He was soaking wet. You’d have thought he’d taken a shower with his clothes on.”
The detectives had gone to the funeral for two reasons. To begin with, they knew that killers sometimes attended the funeral services of their victims, and they wanted to make certain there were no dark-haired, blue-eyed strangers in the crowd. Second, they wanted to show the suspect knife to Patricia Lowery and ask her to identify it as the murder weapon. They had not had a chance to talk to her at the cemetery, so Carella asked Mrs. Lowery if they might speak to Patricia now. Mrs. Lowery left the kitchen to get her. Sitting at the kitchen table, Carella and Kling could hear voices whispering in the other room. They felt curiously removed from the tragedy that had shaken this house, and yet intimately involved in it. They sat listening.
