“Oh, sure, everybody just takes orders,” Gruber said. “The Nazis just took orders, Canby just takes orders, you just take orders, where’s the address book?” he asked Mary.
“I’ll get it,” she said, “don’t get excited. He gets so excited,” she said to Michael.
“Maybe I oughta just call Arthur, he’s probably got the address right at his finger …”
“No, I don’t think you should do that,” Michael said.
“Why not? You said you want to talk to Charlie …”
“We’d like to surprise Mr. Crandall.”
“Oh, he’ll be surprised, all right, don’t worry. An interview with Charlie Nichols? Oh, he’ll wet his pants, believe me. When’s this thing gonna be in the paper?”
“Next Sunday.”
“You work that close, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Here it is,” Mary said, and handed the address book to her husband.
The chimes suddenly began playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
“I love this song,” Mary said.
Gruber waited until the entire little song had played.
Then he said, “Who is it?”
And a man answered, “Police.”
It was as if someone in the platoon had yelled “Charlie!”
His heart stopped.
He almost threw himself flat on the ground. But the ground was a thick white carpet, across which Gruber was now walking to the front door. Michael glanced quickly at Connie. Connie smiled back mysteriously. It occurred to him that Mary’s little hot rum toddy had done a real number on her.
Gruber opened the door.
There were two men standing there.
They were both wearing blue jackets with yellow ribbed cuffs and waistbands.
“Mr. Gruber?” one of the men asked.
He was about Gruber’s height and weight. He had curly red hair and blue eyes that matched his jacket.
“Yes?” Gruber said.
“Detective Harold Nelson, Seventh Precinct,” he said, and immediately turned his back to Gruber. Across the back of the blue jacket, in yellow script lettering, were the words SEVENTH PRECINCT BOWLING TEAM. He turned to face Gruber again. “I called a little while ago,” he said. “This is my partner, Detective Marvin Leibowitz.”
“How do you do?” Leibowitz said. He was taller than Nelson, with black hair and brown eyes. Together they looked like Car 54, Where Are You? In bowling jackets.
“Marvin is our captain,” Nelson said.
“An honor to meet you,” Gruber said.
“Not of the precinct,” Nelson said. “The team.”
“Still an honor,” Gruber said. “Come in, please.”
The way he was treating them, Michael figured Gruber had paid off a great many cops on the streets of New York while filming this or that wonderful motion picture. When he was still living in Boston, they had shot a movie titled Fuzz up there, which was about cops. Burt Reynolds had played the detective in it. Raquel Welch was in it, too, though they never got to kiss because Reynolds was already married to a woman who couldn’t hear or speak.
Michael went to see it later, it turned out to be a lousy movie. But while they were shooting this movie, there were so many real cops hanging around that Michael was sure the entire Boston P.D. was on the take. He suddenly wondered if Winter’s Chill, the new Arthur Crandall masterpiece, had been shot right here in New York City.
“The reason we’re here, sir,” Nelson said, “as I mentioned on the telephone, is we’re the detectives investigating this homicide which we caught in our precinct …”
“Yes, I realize that,” Gruber said.
“Although you wouldn’t know it from the jackets, would you?” Leibowitz said.
“We’re playing later tonight,” Nelson explained.
“The Ninth,” Leibowitz explained.
“Who’s conducting?” Connie asked.
Both Nelson and Leibowitz looked at her. Michael wished they weren’t looking at her that way. She still had the mysterious smile on her face, which made her look somehow insulting.
To cops, anyone smiling that way was either mentally retarded or trying to be a wise guy. He could sense both cops bristling at the way she was smiling. It never occurred to either of them that she might have had too much toddy. They merely saw this Oriental smiling in a superior manner, and they figured her for somebody challenging authority. In Vietnam, sometimes you got an American soldier questioning a native who either lowered his eyes or looked away, and the soldier figured he had something to hide. Couldn’t look you straight in the eye, then he had to be lying or something. Didn’t realize this was a sign of respect, not looking a superior directly in the eye. It caused a lot of trouble in Vietnam. In Vietnam, a lot of innocent people had got themselves shot because they wouldn’t look an American soldier in the eye when he was asking them questions. He wished Connie would stop smiling.
“Is there something comical, miss?” Nelson asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“May I ask what?”
“No,” she said, and kept smiling.
Nelson looked at her as if trying to freeze her solid with his icy blue stare. Leibowitz, standing behind him and to his left, was scowling now. Suddenly, they no longer looked like Car 54. Instead, they looked like two mean detectives who would kick Connie’s ass around the block as soon as look at her.