To no one's enormous surprise, the: medical examiner cited the apparent cause of death as gunshot wounds. This was even before one of the crime scene techs discovered a pair of spent bullets embedded in the door behind the old woman, and another one in the baseboard behind the cat. They looked like they might be thirty-eights, but not even the creative mentors were willing to guess. The tech bagged them and marked them for transport to the lab. There were no latent fingerprints on the windowsill, the sash, or the fire escape outside. No latent footprints, either. To everyone's great relief, the tech who'd been out there came back in and closed the window behind him.
The coats came off.
The building superintendent told them the dead. woman was Mrs. Helder. He said he thought she was Russian or something. Or German, he wasn't sure. He said she'd been living there for almost three years.
Very quiet person, never caused any trouble. But he thought she drank a little.
This was what was known as a one-bedroom apartment. In this city, some so-called one-bedrooms were really L-shaped studios, but this was a genuine one-bedroom, albeit a tiny one. The bedroom faced the street side, which was unfortunate in that the din of automobile horns was incessant and intolerable, even at this early hour of the morning. This was not a particularly desirable section of the city or the precinct.
Mrs. Helder's building was on Lincoln Street, close to the River Harb and the fish market that ran dockside, east to west, for four city blocks.
The team had relieved at a quarter to twelve and would in turn be relieved at seven forty-five A.M. In some American cities, police departments had abandoned what was known as the graveyard shift. This was because detective work rarely required an immediate response except in homicide cases, where any delay in the investigation afforded the killer an invaluable edge. In those cities, what they called Headquarters, or Central, or Metro, or whatever, maintained homicide hot lines that could rustle any detective out of bed in a minute flat. Not this city. In this city, whenever your name came up on the rotating schedule, you pulled a month on what was accurately called the morning shift even though you worked all through the empty hours of the night. The graveyard shift, as it was familiarly and un affectionately called, threw your internal clock all out of whack, and also played havoc with your sex life. It was now five minutes past midnight. In exactly seven hours and forty minutes, the day shift would relieve and the detectives could go home to sleep.
Meanwhile, they were in a tiny one-bedroom apartment that stank of booze and something they realized was cat piss. The kitchen floor was covered with fish bones and the remains of several fish heads.
"Why do you suppose he shot the cat?" Monroe said. "Maybe the cat was barking," Monoghan suggested.
"They got books with cats in them solving murders," Monroe said.
"They got books with all kinds of amateurs in them solving murders,"
Monoghan said.
Monroe looked at his watch.
"You got this under control here?" he asked.
"Sure," Carella said.
"You need any advice or supervision, give us a ring."
"Meanwhile, keep us informed."
"In triplicate," Monoghan said.
There was a double bed in the bedroom, covered with a quilt that looked foreign in origin, and a dresser that " definitely was European, with ornate pulls and painted drawings on the sides and top. The dresser drawers were stacked with underwear and socks and hose and sweaters and blouses. In the top drawer, there was a painted candy tin with costume jewelry in it.
There was a single closet in the bedroom, stuffed with clothes that must have been stylish a good fifty years ago, but which now seemed terribly out of date and, in most instances, tattered and frayed. There was a faint whiff of must coming from the closet. Must and old age.
The old age of the clothes, the old age of the woman who'd once worn them. There was an ineffable sense of sadness in this place.
Silently, they went about their work.
In the living room, there was a floor lamp with a tasseled shade.
There were framed black-and-white photographs of strange people in foreign places.
There was a sofa with ornately carved legs and worn cushions and fading lace antimacassars.
There was a record player. A shellacked 78 rpm record sat on the turntable. Carella bent over to look at the old red RCA Victor label imprinted with the picture of the dog looking into the horn on an old-fashioned phonograph player. The label read:
Albums of 78s and 33 1/3s were stacked on the table beside the record player.
Against one wall, there was an upright piano. The keys were covered with dust. It was apparent that no one had played it for along while.
When they lifted the lid of the piano bench, they found the scrapbook.
There are questions to be asked about scrapbooks.
Was the book created and maintained by the person who was its subject?
Or did a second party assemble it?
