"Jenny liked it warm," Turner said. He nodded. He was silent for several moments, staring at his hands folded on the kitchen table. His hands looked big and dark and somehow useless against the glare of the white oilcloth.
"Who else was there?" Carella asked. "Watching the show?"
"Oh, people I recognized from the building mostly. Some of them leaning out their windows, others coming downstairs to see things firsthand."
"Anyone you didn't recognize?"
"Oh, sure, all those cops."
"Aside from the cops or the ambulance people "Lots of others, sure. You know this city. Anything happens, a big crowd gathers,"
"Did anyone you didn't recognize come out of the building? Aside from cops or…"
"See what you mean, yeah. Just let me think a minute."
The gas jets hissed into the stillness of the apartment. Somewhere in the building, a toilet flushed. Outside on the street, a siren; doowah, doo-wahed to the night. Then all was still again.
"A tall blond man," Turner said.
As he tells it, he first sees the man when he comes out of the alleyway alongside the building. Comes out and stands there with the crowd behind the police lines, hands in his pockets. He's wearing a blue overcoat and a red muffler. Hands in the pockets of the coat. Black shoes. Blond hair blowing in the wind.
"Beard? Mustache?"
"Clean-shaven."
"Anything else you remember about him?"
He just stands there like all the other people, behind the barricades the police have set up, watching all the activity, more cops arriving, plainclothes cops, they must be, uniformed cops, too, with brass on their hats and collars, the man just stands there watching, like interested. Then the ambulance people carry her out of the building on a stretcher, and they put her inside the ambulance and it drives off.
"That's when he went off, too," Turner said. "You watched him leave?"
"Well, yes."
"Why'?"
"There was a… a sort of sad look on his face, I don't know. As if…
I don't know."
"Where'd he go?" Hawes asked. "Which direction?"
"Headed south. Toward the corner. Stopped near the sewer up the street…"
Both detectives were suddenly all ears.
"Bent down to tie his shoelace or something, went on his way again."
Which is how they found the murder weapon.
The gun they'd fished out of the sewer was registered to a man named Rodney Pratt, who on his application for the pistol permit had given his occupation as "security escort" and had stated that he needed to carry a gun because his business was "providing protection of privacy, property, and physical wellbeing to individuals requiring personalized service." They figured this was the politically correct way of saying he was a private bodyguard.
In the United States of America, no one is obliged to reveal his race, color, or creed on any application form. They had no way of knowing Rodney Pratt was black until he opened the door for them at five minutes past three that morning, and glowered out at them in undershirt and boxer shorts. To them, his color was merely an accident of nature.
What mattered was that Ballistics had already identified the gun registered to him as the weapon that had fired three fatal bullets earlier tonight.
"Mr. Pratt?" Hawes asked cautiously.
"Yeah, what?" Pratt asked.
He did not have to say This is three o'fucking clock in the morning, why the fuck are you knocking my door down? His posture said that, his angry frown said that, his blazing eyes said that.
"May we come in, sir?" Hawes asked. "some questions we'd like to ask you."
"What kind of questions?" Pratt asked.
The "sir" had done nothing to mollify him. THere were two honkie cops shaking him out of bed in the middle of the night, and he wasn't buying any thank you. He stood barring the door in his tank undershirt and striped boxer shorts, as muscular as a prizefighter at a weigh-in. Hawes now saw that tattoo on his bulging right biceps read Semper Fidelis An ex-Marine, no less. Probably a sergeant. had seen combat in this or that war the United State seemed incessantly waging. Probably drank the bl of enemy soldiers. Three o'clock in the momingl Hawes bit the bullet.
"Questions about a.38 Smith amp; Wesson reg to you, sir."
"What about it?"
"It was used in a murder earlier tonight, sir. May come in?"
"Come in," Pratt said, and stepped out of the frame, back into the apartment.
Pratt lived in a building on North Carlton Street, the intersection of St. Helen's Boulevard, across way from Mount Davis Park. The neighborhood mixed black, white, Hispanic, some A rents price-fixed.
These old prewar apartments boasted high ceilings, tall windows and parquet In many of them, the kitchens and bathrooms were hopelessly outdated.
