The clock on the squad room wall read eleven-forty P.M. It was twenty minutes to midnight. Cotton Hawes was just coming through the gate in the slatted rail divider that separated the squad room from the corridor outside. Beyond the steel mesh on the high squad room windows, it was still snowing. This meant they could add a half hour, maybe forty minutes to any outside visits they made.
"Frozen tundra out there," Hawes said, and took off his coat. Carella was leafing through the messages on his desk.
"Chicken feathers, huh?" he asked Willis. "Is what the man said,"
Willis answered. "And fish stains on the mink."
"Yeah."
"What kind of fish, did Grossman say?"
"I didn't ask."
"You should have. Just for the halibut."
Willis winced.
"Meyer and Kling tossed the piano player's apartment again," he said.
"Zilch."
"That means a hundred and twenty-five K is still kicking around someplace."
"For what it's worth, Kling thinks the burglar theory's the one to go with."
"That's why we're looking for whoever stole a gun," Hawes said.
"If somebody stole it," Carella said. "Otherwise, Pratt's our man."
"Alibi a mile long."
"Sure, his wife."
"Gee, detective work is so exciting," Willis said and put on his hat and walked out.
"Chicken feathers," Carella said. "What did he say about the shit?"
"Anybody's guess."
"We can dismiss illegal hunting…"
"Nobody hunts chickens."
"So that leaves theft from a chicken market."
"Not too many chicken markets around these days."
"Lots of them in Riverhead and Majesta. Some of the ethnics like their chickens fresh-killed. Hangover from the old country."
"Don't Orthodox Jews kill their chickens fresh?"
"You think it was a dead chicken in the Caddy?"
"Or chickens. Plural."
"Then how come no bloodstains?"
"Good point. So it was a live chicken."
"Or chickens."
"You know how to make Hungarian chicken soup?"
"How?"
"First you steal a chicken."
"Okay, let's say somebody stole a chicken."
"Took it for a ride in the backseat of Pratt's Caddy."
"Would you make that movie?"
"I wouldn't even go see that movie."
"But, okay, just for the halibut, let's say somebody was hungry enough or desperate enough to steal a chicken from a chicken market…"
"Do pet shops sell chickens?"
"Chicks."
"In January?"
"Around Easter."
"Anyway, a chick ain't a chicken."
"No, this had to be a chicken market."
"How about a petting zoo? Where they have goats and cows and chickens and ducks…"
"Do people pet chickens?"
"They cook chickens."
"So, okay, first you steal a chicken."
"They also sacrifice chickens."
"Voodoo."
"Mm."
Both men fell silent. It was midnight. Blue Monday. And still snowing.
"Let's ask around," Hawes said.
The technician who had thought vile thoughts about Fat Ollie Weeks nonetheless got back to him just as he was leaving the squad room at a few minutes past midnight. Except for the names on desktop plaques and bulletin-board duty rosters, the squad room here at the Eight-Eight was an almost exact duplicate of the one at the Eight-Seven, or, for that matter, any other police station in the city. Even the newly constructed buildings began to look shoddy and decrepit time, an apple-green pallor overtaking seemingly at once. Ollie looked at the speckled face the wall clock, remembering that he'd told the tech wanted the stuff by a quarter to, and thinking he'll be lucky Ollie was still here, otherwise it would have been his ass. He ripped open the manila envelope yanked out the report.
No latents at all on the champagne bottles and knife used to slit the estimable Jamal's throat. No latents on any of the bathroom fixtures or any of doorknobs in the apartment, either. Meaning that there hadn't been any other person or persons in the room, then he, she, or they had seen a lot of movies and knew enough to wipe up after themselves. So the only thing they could compare against the corpses fingerprints which the tech had dutifully lifted the two stiffs in the bathroom, copies of which included in the packet was the prints on the patent-leather clutch. The smaller prints on the bag matched the prints of the woman named Yolande Marie Marx, whose Ohio driver's license Ollie found in the red patent-leather clutch. Apparently, Yolande was now lying in the morgue at Hospital; the fingerprints the tech had lifted from the bag identified her as a white, nineteen-year-old shoplifter and prostitute with an arrest record that went back several years. The other prints on the bag matched the late Richie Cooper's. According to the report, Jamal Stone hadn't touched the bag.
Ollie kept reading.
Of hairs, there had been many, and only some of them matched those plucked from the heads of the poor unfortunate victims. Some of the hairs were blond, and they matched samples taken from the head of the dead girl. Fibers vacuumed in the apartment matched fibers from the short black skirt and red fake-fur jacket she'd been wearing at the time of her death.
There were other fibers and other hairs.
