87th Precinct 35 - Heat, page 9
part #35 of 87th Precinct Series
“Mr. Carella?”
“Yes?” he said.
“I can mail that to you sometime tomorrow.”
“No, I don’t want it mailed,” Carella said. “I want to send a messenger for it.”
“I was told it would be mailed, sir.”
“Who told you it would be mailed?”
“My superior, sir.”
“Well, you tell your superior it will not be mailed, you tell your superior I’ll be sending a patrolman to the business office—What’s your address there, give me your address.”
“Sir—”
“Give me your goddamn address!”
“Please don’t curse, sir.”
“What’s the address there?”
“384 Benedict.”
“384 Benedict, right,” Carella said. “A patrolman will be there at two P.M. sharp, Miss Schulz, and he’ll ask for you personally, and I suggest you let him have a record of those calls, for which he will properly sign a receipt, because if he doesn’t get it, the next step is to go before a magistrate to ask for a court order to—”
“Just a moment, please,” Miss Schulz said.
Carella waited again.
He kept waiting.
“Hello?” Miss Schulz said.
“Yes, I’m still here,” Carella said.
“We’ll need a written request,” Miss Schulz said.
“Okay, forget it. I’ll go downtown myself, I’ll get a goddamn court order—”
“Please sir, I wish you wouldn’t curse,” Miss Schulz said. “If you can send someone down with a written request, I can have a transcript of those calls ready for pickup tomorrow morning. I’m sorry I can’t do it sooner than that, but we’re computerized, sir, and this would mean—”
“Tomorrow morning will be fine,” Carella said.
“But we’ll need your written request today.”
“A patrolman will hand-deliver it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Miss Schulz said. “Have a nice day.”
When the call from the Hack Bureau came not ten minutes later, Carella expected more trouble. Make a simple request in this damn city, you got involved with all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit that made your job impossible to do. But the woman he spoke to there told him they had run a routine check on their licensed taxi drivers’ call sheets for the first of August, when Anne Newman said she’d left for Los Angeles, and the eighth of August, when she’d returned. Sure enough, the records showed an August 1, 8:45 A.M. pickup at 74 Silvermine Oval for a passenger going to the city’s international airport, and an August 8, 7:30 A.M. pickup at the airport for a passenger the driver dropped off at 74 Silvermine Oval.
There was no way of ascertaining that the passenger had indeed been Anne Newman, but given the corroborating evidence Genero had garnered (after calling three of the airlines flying to Los Angeles, and finally learning from a fourth airline that their manifests for those dates showed an Anne Newman traveling to and from that city), it seemed certain she’d been in California at the time of her husband’s death. Despite the nagging air-conditioner problem—and maybe Kling was right, maybe Newman had been dead-drunk when he swallowed those capsules—Carella was about to close out the case as a suicide.
The radio on Genero’s desk was silent, but that was only because Lieutenant Byrnes was back at work and in his office. The squadroom was thronged besides on that Monday morning with four other members of the squad who were at the moment planning a raid on a Culver Avenue shooting gallery. Ever since January, and on direct orders from the Commissioner himself, the cops of the Eight-Seven (and indeed every other precinct in the city) had been putting the heat on narcotics dealers; the gallery on Culver had been under surveillance since late February. It was now a known fact that junkies of every persuasion marched in and out of that doorway at 1124 Culver; the cops had parked a van purporting to be a bakery truck just across the street from the building, and they had home movies of virtually every known addict in the precinct. A bust would have been a simple thing. Trot up there to the third floor, round up all the junkies and the small-time pusher doling out the daily fixes, take them all to court, and get the meager sentences for what the cops were certain would be only small quantities of dope.
But at least once a month, the stream of junkies stopped entirely, the gallery upstairs apparently closed for business on those days. Or so the cops believed until their movies revealed certain foreign individuals of French extraction coming and going on the days the junkie traffic trickled off. It was their guess that on those days huge quantities of heroin or cocaine were exchanged for similarly huge quantities of dollars. In effect, the shooting gallery was a cover for a much bigger operation, the bad guys hoping the cops wouldn’t be interested in any penny-ante shit, and hoping further that the big-time dealing would go unnoticed in the rush of daily hand-to-mouth trade. Lieutenant Byrnes found it impossible to believe that a shooting gallery operating virtually in the open could be a cover for a multimillion-dollar narcotics operation. But Detective Meyer Meyer—who was in charge of the surveillance and the impending raid—figured the bad guys had only taken their cue from the CIA. Meyer maintained that no professional intelligence agency could be as blunderingly stupid as the CIA. The CIA had to be a cover for America’s real intelligence agency.
In much the same way, the guys buying narcotics from their Gallic cousins, must have figured that a small-time mom-and-pop dope store would be allowed to flourish unmolested when the cops had bigger fish to fry. The bigger fish, the cops now firmly believed, could be hooked on the third floor of 1124 Culver Avenue once a month, every month of the year. The raid was set for this Wednesday night, the thirteenth of August. The detectives were working out their strategy when the woman came up the iron-runged steps leading to the second floor of the station house, and paused just outside the slatted-rail divider that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside.
“Yes?” Carella said. “May I help you?”
She was a woman in her late thirties, he guessed, dressed entirely and suitably in summertime white—a white dress and white high-heeled pumps, a white shoulder-slung leather bag, a white carnation in her jet-black hair. She was tall and superbly tanned, her eyes the color of anthracite in a sharp-nosed Mediterranean face that could have belonged to a Spaniard or an Italian, a generous mouth with a beauty spot near the tapered corner of her lips.
“I am looking for the policeman investigating the death of Jeremiah Newman,” she said. She spoke with a distinctive foreign accent Carella couldn’t quite place. She appeared calm and unruffled, as though walking into a police station did not have the same disquieting effect on her that it had on most citizens, innocent or guilty.
“I’m Detective Carella,” he said. “I’m handling that case.”
“May I come in?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” he said, and rose from his desk, and came around the green filing cabinets to open the gate in the railing for her. Across the room, Genero looked up from where he was typing and scanned her head to toe, his eyes lingering on legs Carella now noticed were beautifully proportioned. She sat in the chair beside his desk, crossing her legs, and Genero could not resist a long low whistle. The woman seemed not to have heard it. At his own desk, surrounded by detectives listening to his game plan, Meyer looked up and glared at Genero, who shrugged and went back to his typing.
“I am Jessica Herzog,” the woman said. “I was once married to Jeremiah.”
“How do you do?” Carella said, and waited. Jessica looked around the squadroom, as though wanting to make certain of her surroundings before committing herself to anything further. Across the room, Genero looked up from his typing, studying her breasts this time, firm and full in the scoop-necked top of the white dress. A moment later, he picked up an eraser.
“I received a call from my brother on Saturday. He wanted to tell me about the funeral the next day,” Jessica said. “He thought I might want to attend. I could not, of course, attend. We have been divorced now for almost sixteen years it will be. I meant no disrespect, but clearly it would have been impossible.”
“Why do you say that, Miss Herzog?”
“Well, because of Anne, don’t you see?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“It was for Anne that he left me all those years ago. I think it would have been an uncomfortable situation, don’t you think? To be there at his funeral? With his present wife, I mean?”
“Yes, I can see where—”
“So of course I said I could not go. I hope Martin understood.”
“Martin?” Carella said.
“Yes, my brother. He is the one who introduced me to Jeremiah when I first came here.”
“Excuse me, Miss Herzog, but where are you from originally?”
“Israel,” she said.
“Ah,” he said.
“I still have a terrible accent, I know.”
“No, no,” he said.
“Yes, I know, do not lie, please. I am here for nineteen years now and my English is still so bad. I came to sell bonds for my country, I was at the time a captain in the Israeli Army,” she said, and Carella remembered the way she had reconnoitered the squadroom just a few moments earlier, as though scouting for high ground. “Well, that was a long time ago, I was only twenty-two at the time. I have been living here since, but I go back every now and again to Tel Aviv. My mother still lives in Tel Aviv. All my friends are here now,” she said, “and of course my brother. It would be difficult to return there to live.”
“And you say you met Mr. Newman through your brother?”
“Yes, at a bond rally. And we fell in love and got married. Two years later, he met Anne, and he asked me for a divorce. Well, that is how it is sometimes, you know.”
“Yes,” Carella said, and wondered why she had come to the squadroom. He waited.
“My brother mentioned to me that Jeremiah had died of sleeping pills. He had taken too many sleeping pills.”
“Yes, that’s what the autopsy revealed.”
“Yes, but that is impossible, don’t you see?”
“Impossible? Why?”
“Well, I was only married to him for two years, you understand, but you come to know a person very well when you are living with him, and I can tell you Jeremiah would not have taken even one sleeping pill, never mind how many he is supposed to have taken.”
“Twenty-nine,” Carella said.
“Impossible,” she said. “Not Jeremiah.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“He had a terrible fear of drugs, do you see? He would not even take an aspirin if he had a headache. It was from when he was a teenager, and a doctor gave him penicillin tablets and he had a severe reaction and almost died. Believe me, Jeremiah would not have swallowed voluntarily any kind of pill. I know. I lived with him. Even an aspirin, believe me. He would rather have suffered through the night than take an aspirin. He told me it would make him throw up. So how can a man with such fear take so many pills to kill him?”
“It’s supposed to be a painless death, Miss Herzog. Barbiturate poisoning—”
“Not to Jeremiah. Not taking any kind of pill. That would not have been painless to him. He would have died of fright first.”
“I see,” Carella said.
“I was talking about this to Jonathan only last week,” she said, “about his brother’s fear of drugs. We used to laugh about it when we were still married, you know, the way Jeremiah would go pale if you even mentioned any kind of medication. Well, his brother, Jonathan, remembered, of course. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t been here to see you. Has he been here to see you?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Well, he lives in San Francisco, you know…”
“Yes, of course, but he is here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jonathan. He is here.”
“In the city, do you mean?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did he fly in for the funeral, is that it?”
“From before the funeral. He has been here almost two weeks now.”
Carella looked at her.
“I thought you understood, when I said I had been talking to him—”
“I thought you meant on the telephone.”
“No, he is here. He called me when he arrived, we had lunch together one day. He is a nice man, Jonathan.”
“I’m surprised his mother didn’t mention—”
“Well, so many things on her mind. The funeral, you know.”
“Yes. Would you know where he’s staying?”
“At the Pierpont. Do you know this hotel?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Downtown, near Farley Square?”
“Yes, I know it.”
“You should go to see him,” Jessica said, “before he leaves. He will tell you how Jeremiah felt about drugs. He will tell you it would have been impossible for him to have taken those pills.” She nodded emphatically. “Impossible,” she said.
Kling should have realized his marriage was doomed the moment he began tailing his wife.
Carella could have told him that in any marriage there was a line either partner simply could not safely cross. Once you stepped over that line, once you said or did something that couldn’t possibly be taken back, the marriage was irretrievable. In any good marriage, there were arguments and even fights—but you fought fair if you wanted the marriage to survive. The minute you started hitting below the belt, it was time to call the divorce lawyers. That’s why Carella had asked him to discuss this thing with Augusta.
Instead, Kling decided he would find out for himself whether she was seeing another man. He made his decision after a hot, sleepless night. He made it on the steamy morning of August 11, while he and Augusta were eating breakfast. He made it ten minutes before she left for her first assignment of the week.
He was a cop. Tailing a suspect came easily and naturally to him. Standing together at the curb outside their building, Augusta looking frantically at her watch, Kling trying to get a taxi at the height of the morning rush hour, he told her there was something he wanted to check at the office, and would probably be gone all day. Even though this was his day off, she accepted the lie; all too often in the past, he had gone back to the station house on his day off. He finally managed to hail a taxi, and when it pulled in to the curb, he yanked open the rear door for her.
“Where are you going, honey?” he asked.
“Ranger Photography, 1201 Goedkoop.”
“Have you got that?” Kling asked the cabbie through the open window on the curbside.
“Got it,” the cabbie said.
Augusta blew a kiss at Kling, and the taxi pulled away from the curb and into the stream of traffic heading downtown. It took Kling ten minutes to find another cab. He was in no hurry. He had checked Augusta’s appointment calendar while she was bathing before bed last night, when he was still mulling his decision. It had showed two sittings for this morning: one at Ranger Photography for 9:00, the other at Coopersmith Creatives for 11:00. Her next appointment was at 2:00 in the afternoon at Fashion Flair, and alongside this she had penned in the words Cutler if time. Cutler was the agency representing her.
Goedkoop Avenue was in the oldest section of town, its narrow streets and gabled waterfront houses dating back to when the Dutch were still governing. The area lay cheek by jowl with the courthouses and municipal buildings in the Chinatown Precinct, but whereas the illusion was one of overlap, the business here was neither legal nor administrative. Goedkoop was in the heart of the financial district, an area of twentieth-century skyscrapers softened by the old Dutch warehouses and wharves, the later British churches and graveyards. Here and there in lofts along the narrow side streets, the artists and photographers had taken up residence, spilling over from the Quarter and the more recently voguish “Hopscotch” area, so-called because the first gallery to open there was on Hopper Street, overlooking the Scotch Meadows Park. Standing across the street from 1201 Goedkoop, where he had asked the cabbie to let him out, Kling looked around for a pay phone, and then went into a cigar store on the corner of Goedkoop and Fields, where he looked up the phone number for Ranger Photography. From a phone booth near the magazine rack, he dialed the number and waited.
“Ranger,” a man’s voice said.
“May I speak to Augusta Blair, please?” he said. It rankled every time he had to use her maiden name, however damn professionally necessary it was.
“Minute,” the man said.
Kling waited.
When she came onto the line, he said, “Gussie, hi, I’m sorry to break in this way.”
“We haven’t started yet,” she said. “I just got here a few minutes ago. What is it, Bert?”
“I wanted to remind you, we’re having dinner with Meyer and Sarah tonight.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh, okay then.”
“We talked about it at breakfast,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Right, right. Okay then. They’re coming by at seven for drinks.”
“Yes,” she said, “I have it in my book. Where are you now, Bert?”
“Just got here,” he said. “You want to try that new Italian joint on Trafalgar?”
“Yes, sure. Bert, I have to go. They’re waving frantically.”
“I’ll make a reservation,” he said. “Eight o’clock sound okay?”
“Yes, fine. ’Bye, darling, I’ll talk to you later.”
There was a click on the line. Okay, he thought, she’s where she’s supposed to be. He put the phone back on the hook, and then went out into the street again. It was blazing hot already, and his watch read only 9:27. He crossed the street to 1201 Goedkoop, and entered the building, checking to see if there was a side or a back entrance. Nothing. Just the big brass doors through which he’d entered, and through which Augusta would have to pass when she left. He looked at his watch again, and then went across the street to take up his position.
She did not come out of the building until a quarter to 11:00.
