Sadie When She Died полностью

“Hey, I’m only kidding,” Thornton said, the grin expanding. “We had a ball together. Otherwise, why’d she keep coming back for more?”

“Who knows? She stopped coming back, didn’t she?”

“Only because I went out of town for a while.”

“How long a while?”

“Four days,” Thornton said. “I went out to Arizona to pick up some Indian silver. We sell some crap here, too, in addition to what Paul and I make.”

“Gone only four days, and the lady never called again,” Kling said.

“Yeah, well, maybe she got sore. I left kind of sudden like.”

“What day was it?”

“Huh?”

“The day you left?”

“I don’t know. Why? The middle of the week, I guess. I don’t remember. Anyway, who cares?” Thornton said. “There are plenty of broads in this city. What’s one more or less?” He shrugged, and then looked suddenly thoughtful.

“Yes?” Meyer said.

“Nothing. Just . . .”

“Yes?”

“She was kind of special, I have to admit it. I mean, she wasn’t the kind of broad you’d take home to mother, but she was something else. She was really something else.”

“How do you mean?”

“She was . . .” Thornton grinned. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “She took me places I’d never been before, you know what I mean?”

“No, what do you mean?” Kling said.

“Use your imagination,” Thornton said, still grinning.

“I can’t,” Kling answered. “There’s no place I’ve never been before.”

“Sadie would’ve found some for you,” Thornton said, and the grin suddenly dropped from his face. “She’ll call again, I’m sure of it. She’s got my number right there in her book, she’ll call.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Meyer said.

“Why not? She kept coming back, didn’t she? We had . . .”

“She’s dead,” Meyer said.

They kept watching his face. It did not crumble, it did not express grief, it did not even express shock. The only thing it expressed was sudden anger.

“The stupid twat,” Thornton said. “That’s all she ever was, a stupid twat.”

Police work (like life) is often not too tidy. Take surveillance, for example. On Friday afternoon, Carella had asked Byrnes for permission to begin surveillance of Gerald Fletcher on Sunday morning. Being a police officer himself, and knowing that police work (like life) is often not too tidy, Byrnes never once thought of asking Carella why he would not prefer to start his surveillance the very next day, Saturday, instead of waiting two days. The reason Carella did not choose to start the very next day was that police work (like life) is often not too tidy—as in the case of the noun “surveillance” and the noun/adjective “surveillant,” neither of which has a verb to go with it in the English language.

Carella had 640 odds-and-ends to clean up in the office on Saturday before he could begin the surveillance of Gerald Fletcher with anything resembling an easy conscience. So he had spent the day making phone calls and typing up reports and generally trying to put things in order. In all his years of police experience, he had never known a criminal who was so considerate of a policeman’s lot that he would wait patiently for one crime to be solved before committing another. There were four burglaries, two assaults, a robbery, and a forgery still unsolved in Carella’s case load; the least he could do was try to create some semblance of order from the information he had on each before embarking on a lengthy and tedious surveillance. Besides, surveillance (like police work) is often not too tidy.

On Sunday morning, Carella was ready to become a surveillant. That is to say, he was ready to adopt a surveillant stance and thereby begin surveillance of his suspect. The trouble was, just as the English language had been exceptionally untidy in not having stolen the verb from the French when it swiped the noun and the adjective, a surveillance (like life and like police work) is bound to get untidy if there is nobody to surveille.

Gerald Fletcher was nowhere in sight.

Carella had started his surveillance with the usual police gambit of calling Fletcher’s apartment from a nearby phone booth early in the morning. The object of this sometimes transparent ploy was to ascertain that the suspect was still in his own digs, after which the police tail would wait downstairs for him to emerge and then follow him to and fro wherever he went. Gerald Fletcher, however, was not in his digs. This being Sunday morning, Carella automatically assumed that Fletcher was spending the weekend elsewhere. But, intrepid law enforcer he, and steadfast surveillant besides, he parked the squad’s new (used) 1970 Buick sedan across the street from Fletcher’s apartment building, and alternately watched the front door of 721 Silvermine Oval and the kids playing in the park, thinking that perhaps Fletcher had merely spent S*A*T*U*R*D*A*Y N*I*G*H*T someplace and might return home momentarily.