Blaney found eighteen inches of the small intestine severed and hanging in the uterus. The pain would have been excruciating. Hemorrhaging would have been profuse. The girl could have died within minutes.
Which might have been a blessing, he guessed.
Only one of the three Richards knew he had just for the fun of it inserted a bread knife with a serrated blade into the girl's vagina.
The other two didn't know such a thing had happened although later they saw a lot of blood running down the inside of her legs and figured it was the black guy with his big shlong had hurt her somehow. Even the one who'd experimented with the knife didn't realize this was what had killed her. He figured the bag over her head had done it, the girl's stupidity in not informing them that the game had gone too far. She should have told them. No one had wanted her dead. Every one of them wanted black Richard dead. Black Richard was their link to the dead girl, who had died by accident, after all, and for whom they most certainly were not about to ruin their lives, all three of them accepted at Harvard?. Hey.
So as Richard thrashed around in the tub, trying to keep his head above water, the three other Richards kept forcing him back under again, time after time, avoiding his pummeling fists, trying not to get themselves all wet, trying just to for Christ's sake drown him.
They were succeeding in doing just that, finally succumbing to their overpowering insistence subsiding below the surface of the water, unclenching at last, a final thin bubble of air his mouth and rising, rising, when a voice behind them yelled, "The fuck you doin?"
They were each and separately, all three Richards overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of deja vu all again, a black man standing there with outraged surprise on his face, only this time Richard the First had a knife, and he snapped the blade open at once because the last thing on earth they needed was another asshole linking them to a murder.
Jamal remembered too late what his sacred mother taught him about the streets of this here city, it was Mind your own business, son, an stay out of harms way. But this wasn't a city street, this was the bathroom of a onetime business associate sometime friend, and he was being drowned in his own bathtub by three fuckin college boys, or whatever they were, and one of them had a knife in his fist and he was coming at Jamal with a tiny little smile on his face. It was then that Jamal knew this was serious. Man with a big mother knife in his hand and a smile on his face was dangerous. But, of course, all of this was too late, the memory of his mother's admonition, the memory of smiles he had seen on the faces of other would-be assassins, of whom there were far too many in this part of the city in this part of the world.
Smiling, Richard the First slashed Jamal's jugular with a single swipe of the blade, and then dropped the knife as if it were on fire.
The other two Richards went pale.
And now it became the tale of a handbag.
The door to Svetlana Dyalovich's apartment was padlocked and a printed CRIME SCENE notice was tacked to it. But Meyer and Kling had obtained a key from the Property Clerk's Office, and they marched right in.
"What a dump," Meyer said. "Smells, too," Kling said. "Cat piss,"
Meyer agreed.
A pair of uniformed cops had already delivered the old lady's dead cat to the Humane Society for cremation, but Meyer and Kling didn't know that, and besides the apartment still stank. They did know that Carella and Hawes, and presumably the technicians from the Mobile Crime Unit, had conducted a thorough search of the apartment. But this morning Carella had suggested that they might have missed something namely a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash and another run-through might be a good idea.
They both thought about that kind of money for a moment.
A hundred and twenty-five thousand was about a third more than their combined annual salaries. It was a sobering thought. They began looking.
There was a dead man in the bathtub and another dead man on the bathroom floor. One of them had been drowned, and the other's throat had been slit. This almost had comic possibilities. Too bad the one bleeding all over the tile floor wasn't named Richard, too. Then there would have been five Richards in the apartment instead of just four, three of whom were running around looking for a red patent-leather bag. The fourth one wasn't doing any running at all. The fourth one would never do any running ever again Nor swimming, either, which he'd never learned to do, anyway. None of the live Richards knew who the other dead man was, and they were squeamish about going through his pockets for identification. Slitting a man's throat was one thing. Frisking him was quite another.
