Fingerprints, palm prints, fragmentary impressions of sweat pores, footprints, sole prints, sock prints, broken windows, broken locks, animal tracks and tire tracks, dust and rust and feathers and film, rope burns and powder burns, stains of paint or urine or oil—all were there on that day, all waiting to be examined and compared, identified and catalogued.

  And, in addition, there was the apparent suicide the boys of the 87th had dropped into his lap.

  Grossman sighed heavily and once again consulted the drawing his laboratory artist had made from an on-the-spot sketch of the death chamber:

  In suicide, as in baseball, it is sometimes difficult to tell who is who or what is what without a scorecard. Grossman turned over the Lucite-encased sketch and studied the typewritten key rubber-cemented to its back:

  BEDROOM - APARTMENT 1-A

  1516 South 5th Street

  1. Chair and woman’s clothing.

  2. Woman’s shoes.

  3. Scatter rug.

  4. Whisky stain.

  5. Whisky bottle, upended.

  6. Whisky bottle, standing.

  7. Bed and victims.

  8. End table and typewriter.

  9. Man’s shoes.

  10. Easy chair and man’s clothing.

  11. End table and lamp.

  12. Typewritten note and wristwatch.

  13. Wallet, tie clip, loose change.

  14. String of pearls, earrings.

  15. Dresser.

  The little circles containing the letters A, B, C, D, and E, Grossman knew, indicated the camera angles of the photographs taken in the bedroom and enclosed in the folder he now held in his hands. The police photographer had taken, in order:

  A. A close shot of the suicide note and the wristwatch holding it down on the dresser top.

  B. A medium shot of Tommy Barlow’s clothing on the easy chair and his shoes resting beside the chair.

  C. A full shot of the bed with the bodies of Irene Thayer and Tommy Barlow lying on it.

  D. A medium shot showing the scatter rug and the two whisky bottles, as well as the chair upon and over which were Irene Thayer’s clothes, and beside which were her shoes.

  E. A close shot of the typewriter resting on an end table beside the bed.

  Grossman studied the sketch and the photographs several times more, reread the report one of his technicians had prepared, and then sat down at a long white counter in the lab, took a telephone receiver from its wall bracket, and dialed Frederick 7-8024. The desk sergeant who answered the telephone connected him immediately with Steve Carella in the squadroom upstairs.

  “I’ve got all this junk on your suicide,” Grossman said. “You want to hear about it?”

  “I do,” Carella said.

  “Are you guys busy?”

  “Moderately so.”

  “Boy, this has been a day,” Grossman said. He sighed wearily. “What’d they give you as cause of death on this one?” he asked.

  “Acute carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “Mmm,” Grossman said.

  “Why? Did you find some spent discharge shells or something?”

  “No such luck. It sure looks like a suicide, from what we’ve got here, but at the same time…I don’t know. There’s something not too kosher about this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’d figure a suicide, wouldn’t you?” Grossman said cautiously. “Whisky bottles, open gas jets, an explosion. It all adds up, right? It verifies the figures.”

  “What figures?”

  “On deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning in this city every year. I’ve got a chart here. Shall I read you what the chart says?”

  “Read to me,” Carella answered, smiling.

  “Eight hundred forty deaths a year, four hundred forty of which are suicides. Four hundred thirty-five of those are from illuminating gas. So it figures, doesn’t it? And add the whisky bottles. Suicides of this type will often drink themselves into a stupor after turning on the gas. Or sometimes, they’ll take sleeping pills, anything to make the death nice and pleasant, you know?”

  “Yeah, nice and pleasant,” Carella said.

  “Yeah. But there’s something a little screwy about this setup, Steve. I’ll tell you the truth, I wonder about it.”

  “What have you got, Sam?”

  “Number one, this whole business of the whisky bottles on the floor. Not near the head of the bed, but near the foot. And one of them knocked over. Why were the bottles near the foot of the bed, where they couldn’t be reached if this couple had really been drinking?”

  “They weren’t drunk, Sam,” Carella said. “Not according to our toxicologist.”

  “Then where’d all that booze go to?” Grossman said. “And something else, Steve. Where are the glasses?”

  “I don’t know. Where are they?”

  “In the kitchen sink. Washed very nicely. Two glasses sitting in the sink all sparkling clean. Funny?”

  “Very funny,” Carella said. “If you’ve turned on the gas and are trying to get drunk, why get out of bed to wash the glasses?”

  “Well, they had to get out of bed anyway, didn’t they? To put on their clothes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, Steve, the whole thing smells of a love nest, doesn’t it? We checked their garments for seminal stains, and there weren’t any. So they must have been naked if they—”

  “They didn’t,” Carella said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Autopsy report. No signs of intercourse.”

  “Mmmmm,” Grossman said. “Then what were they doing with most of their clothes off?”

  “Do you want an educated guess?”

  “Shoot.”

  “They probably planned to go out in a blaze of romantic glory. They got partially undressed, turned on the gas, and then were overcome before anything could happen. That’s my guess.”

  “It doesn’t sound very educated to me,” Grossman said.

  “All right, then,” Carella said, “they were exhibitionists. They wanted their pictures in the paper without clothes on.”

  “That not only sounds uneducated, it sounds positively ignorant.”

  “Give me a better guess.”

  “A third person in that apartment,” Grossman said.

  “That’s educated, huh?”

  “That’s highly educated,” Grossman said. “Considering the fact that three glasses were used.”

  “What?”

  “Three glasses.”

  “You said two a minute ago.”

  “I said two in the sink. But we went through the cupboard over the sink, and we checked the glassware there, just because we had nothing else to do, you understand. Most of them were shattered by the blast, but—”

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

  “Light film of dust on all the glasses but one. This one had been recently washed, and then dried with a dish towel we found on a rack under the sink. The lint on the glass compared positive. What do you think?”

  “They could have used three glasses, Sam.”

  “Sure. Then why did they leave two in the sink and put the third one back in the cupboard?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A third person,” Grossman said. “In fact, when we consider the last, and, I must admit, very very peculiar phenomenon, I’m almost convinced the third person is much more than just an educated guess.”

  “What’s the phenomenon, Sam?”

  “No latent impressions in the room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No prints.”

  “Of a third person, do you mean?”

  “Of anybody, I mean.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m telling you,” Grossman said. “Not a fingerprint on anything. Not on the glasses, not on the bottles, not on the typewriter, not even on their shoes, Steve. Now how the hell do you type a suicide note and not leave prints all over the keys? How do you take off a pair of shoes—where there’s a good waxy surface that can pick up some beauties—and not leave some kind of an impression? How do you pour yourself a drink, and not leave at least a palm print on the bottle? Uh-uh, Steve, it stinks to high heaven.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “My guess is somebody went around that room and wiped off every surface, every article that anybody—especially himself— had touched.”

  “A man?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said ‘himself.’”

  “Poetic license. It could have been man, woman, or trained chimpanzee, for all I know. I just finished telling you there’s nothing in that apartment, nothing. And that’s why it stinks. Whoever wiped up the place must have read a lot of stories about how we track down dangerous gunmen because they left behind a telltale print.”

  “We won’t tell them the truth, huh?”

  “No, let ’em guess.” Grossman paused. “What do you think?”

  “Must have been an orgy,” Carella said, smiling.

  “You serious?”

  “Booze, a naked broad—maybe two naked broads, for all we know. What else could it have been?”

  “It could have been somebody who found them in bed together, clobbered them, and then set up the joint to look like a suicide.”

  “Not a mark on either one of them, Sam.”

  “Well, I’m just telling you what I think. I think there was a third party in that room. Who, or why, you’ll have to figure out for yourself.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. How’s the wife and kids?”

  “Fine. Sam…”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Sam, not any prints? Not a single print?”

  “Nothing.”

  Carella thought for a moment and then said, “They could have wiped the place themselves.”

  “Why?” Grossman asked.

  “Neat. Just as you said. Note neatly typed, clothes neatly stacked, shoes neatly placed. Maybe they were very neat people.”

  “Sure. So they went around dusting the place before they took the pipe.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure,” Grossman said. “Would you do that?”

  “I’m not neat,” Carella said.

  The combination of Bert Kling and Michael Thayer was a curiously trying one. Hawes liked Kling a hell of a lot, or at least he had liked the Bert Kling he’d known until last year; the new Bert Kling was someone he didn’t know at all. Being with him for any length of time was a strange and frustrating experience. This was surely Bert Kling, the same clean young looks, the blond hair, the same voice. You saw him coming into the squadroom or walking down the street, and you wanted to go up to him with your hand extended and say, “Hi, there, Bert, how are you?” You wanted to crack jokes with him, or go over the details of a perplexing case. You wanted to sit with him and have a cup of coffee on days when it was raining outside the squadroom. You wanted to like this guy who was wearing the face and body of Bert Kling, you wanted to tell him he was your friend, you wanted to say, “Hey, Bert, let’s get drunk together tonight.” You wanted to do all these things and say all these things because the face was familiar, the walk was familiar, the voice was familiar—and then something stopped you dead in your tracks, and you had the feeling that you were only looking at a plastic mold of Bert Kling, only talking to the recorded voice of Bert Kling, that something inside this shell had gone dead, and you knew what the something was, of course, you knew that Claire Townsend had been murdered.

  There are different ways of mourning.

  When a man’s fiancée is the victim of a brutal, senseless massacre in a bookshop, he can react in many ways, all of which are valid, none of which can be predetermined. He can cry his eyes out for a week or a month, and then accept the death, accept the fact that life goes on, with or without the girl he was going to marry one day, life is a progression, a moving forward, and death is a cessation. Bert Kling could have accepted the life surrounding him, could have accepted death as a natural part of life.

  Or he could have reacted in another manner. He could have refused flatly to acknowledge the death. He could have gone on living with the fantasy that Claire Townsend was alive and well someplace, that the events that had started with a phone call to the squadroom on the thirteenth of October last year, moved into the shocking discovery of Claire among the victims in the bookshop, and culminated in the vicious beating of the man who’d killed her—he could have gone on pretending, indeed believing that none of these things had happened. Everything was just the way it was. He would continue to wait for Claire’s return, and when she came he would laugh with her and hold her in his arms and make love to her again, and one day they would be married. He could have kidded himself in that way.

  Or he could have accepted the death without a tear, allowing grief to build inside him like a massive monument, stone added to stone, until the smiling outer visage became the ornate facade of a crumbling tomb, vast, and black, and windswept.

  It is perhaps simple for an accountant to evaluate the murder of his fiancée, to go through the tribal custom of mourning, and then to cherish the memory of the girl while philosophically adjusting to the elementary facts of life and death. An accountant adds up columns of figures and decides how much income tax his client owes Uncle Sam. An accountant is concerned with mathematics. Bert Kling was a cop. And being a cop, being involved daily in work that involved crime, he was faced with constant reminders of the girl he had loved and the manner in which she had met her death. It was one thing to walk the streets of the precinct and to cross a six-year-old kid who stood on a street corner waiting for the traffic to pass. It was one thing to be investigating a burglary, or a robbery, or a beating, or a disappearance. It was quite another thing to be investigating a homicide.

  The facts of life in the 87th Precinct were too often the facts of death. He had looked into the lifeless eyes of Claire Townsend on October 13 last year, and since that time he had looked into the lifeless eyes of three dozen more victims, male and female, and the eyes were always the same, the eyes always seemed to look up beseechingly as if something had been ripped forcibly from them before they were ready, the eyes seemed to be pleading for that something to be put back, the eyes seemed to beg silently, “Please give it back to me, I wasn’t ready.” The circumstances of death were always different. He had walked into a room and found a man with a hatchet imbedded in his skull, he had looked down at the eviscerated victim of a hit-and-run, he had opened a closet door and discovered a young girl with a rope knotted about her neck, hanging from the clothes bar, he had found an alcoholic who had drunk himself to death in the doorway of a whorehouse, the circumstances were always different—but the eyes were always the same.

  “Please give it back to me,” they said. “I wasn’t ready.”

  And each time he looked into a new pair of eyes, he turned away because the image of Claire Townsend on the bookshop floor, her blouse stained a bright red, the book lying open in a tent over her face, his hands lifting the book, his eyes looking into her own dead and staring eyes, this image always and suddenly flared into his mind and left him numb and senseless. He could not think clearly for several moments, he could only turn away from each new corpse and stare at the wall like a man transfixed while a private horror movie ran in the tight projection booth of his mind, reel after reel until he wanted to scream aloud and stopped himself from doing so only by clenching his teeth.

  Death meant only one thing to Kling. Death meant Claire Townsend. The daily reminders of death were daily reminders of Claire. And with each reminder, his emotions would close like a fist, tightly clenched; he could not open it, he could not afford to let go. He withdrew instead, retreating from each grisly prod, accepting the burden of memory wearily, refusing sympathy, forsaking hope, foreseeing a future as bleak and as barren as the present.

  The equation that day in the tiny office of Michael Thayer in the Brio Building was a simple one. Hawes examined the equation dispassionately, uncomfortable in the presence of Kling and Thayer, recognizing the source of his discomfort, but finding no solace at all in the recognition. Irene Thayer equaled Death equaled Claire Townsend. Such was the elementary equation that seemed to electrify the very air in the small room.

  The room was on the sixth floor of the building, its single window open to the April breezes. It contained a desk and a file cabinet and a telephone and a calendar and two chairs. Michael Thayer sat in one of the chairs behind the desk. Hawes sat in the chair in front of the desk. Kling stood tensed like a spring coil alongside Hawes, as if ready to unlock and leap across the desk the moment Thayer said anything contradictory. A stack of completed greeting-card verse rested alongside Thayer’s typewriter in a neat, squared pile. A sheet of unfinished doggerel was in the typewriter.

  “We work pretty far in advance,” Thayer said. “I’m already doing stuff for next Valentine’s Day.”

  “Don’t you find it difficult to work so soon after the funeral, Mr. Thayer?” Kling asked.

  The question seemed so cruel, so heartlessly devised, that Hawes was instantly torn between a desire to gag Kling and a desire to punch him right in the mouth. Instead, he saw the pain flicker in Thayer’s eyes for an instant, and he almost felt the pain himself, and then Thayer said very softly, “Yes, I find it difficult to work.”

  “Mr. Thayer,” Hawes said quickly, “we don’t mean to intrude at a time like this, believe me, but there are some things we have to know.”

  “Yes, you said that the last time I saw you.”

  “I meant it then, and I mean it now.”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Did you know your wife was going to sue you for divorce?” Kling asked abruptly.

  Thayer looked surprised. “No.” He paused. “How do you know that?”

  “We talked with her lawyer,” Hawes said.

  “Her lawyer? Art Patterson, do you mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He never said anything to me about it.”

  “No, sir, she asked him not to.”

 

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