The girl was perhaps nineteen years old, a college girl working in the store for the Christmas rush. The most exciting thing that had happened on the job, until this very moment, was an elderly Frenchman asking her if she would like to spend the month of February on his yacht in the Mediterranean. Speechlessly, the girl studied the shield, her eyes bugging. It suddenly occurred to Carella that Fletcher might have had the purchases sent to his home address, in which case all this undercover work was merely a waste of time. Well, he thought, you win some, you lose some.
“Are these items being sent?” he asked.
“Yes,
“Can you tell me where?” Carella asked.
“Yes,
“Thank you very much,” Carella said.
It felt like Christmas Day already.
Bert Kling was sitting up in bed and polishing off his dinner when Carella got to the hospital at close to 7 P . M . The men shook hands, and Carella took a seat by the bed.
“This stuff tastes awful,” Kling said, “but I’ve been hungry as hell, ever since I got in here. I could almost eat the tray.”
“When are you getting out?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ve got a broken rib, nice, huh?”
“Very nice,” Carella said.
“I’m lucky they didn’t mess up my insides,” Kling said. “That’s what the doctors were afraid of, internal hemorrhaging. But I’m okay, it seems. They taped up the rib, and whereas I won’t be able to do my famous trapeze act for a while, I should be able to get around.”
“Who did it, Bert?”
“Three locomotives, it felt like.”
“Why?”
“A warning to stay away from Nora Simonov.”
“Were you seeing a lot of her?”
“I saw her twice. Apparently someone saw me seeing her. And decided to put me in the hospital. Little did they know I’m a minion of the law, huh?”
“Little did they know,” Carella said.
“I’ll have to ask Nora a few questions when I get out of here. How’s the case going?”
“I’ve located Fletcher’s girlfriend.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“Brown tailed them last night, got an address for her, but no name. Fletcher just sent her some underwear.”
“Nice,” Kling said.
“Very nice. I’m getting a court order to put a wire in the apartment.”
“What do you expect them to talk about?”
“Bloody murder maybe,” Carella said, and shrugged. Both men were silent for several moments.
“You know what I want for Christmas?” Kling asked suddenly.
“What?”
“I want to find those guys who beat me up.”
The man who picked the lock on Arlene Orton’s front door, ten minutes after she left her apartment on Wednesday morning, was better at it than any burglar in the city, and he happened to work for the Police Department. He had the door open in three minutes flat, at which time a technician went in and wired the joint. It took the technician longer to set up his equipment than it had taken his partner to open the door, but both were artists in their own right, and the sound man had a lot more work to do.
The telephone was the easiest of his jobs. He unscrewed the carbon mike in the mouthpiece of the phone, replaced it with his own mike, attached his wires, screwed the mouthpiece back on, and was instantly in business—or almost in business. The tap would not become operative until the telephone company supplied the police with a list of so-called bridging points that located the pairs and cables for Arlene Orton’s phone. The monitoring equipment would be hooked into these, and whenever a call went out of or came into the apartment, a recorder would automatically tape both ends of the conversation. In addition, whenever a call was made from the apartment, a dial indicator would ink out a series of dots that signified the number being called. The police listener would be monitoring the equipment from wherever the bridging point happened to be; in Arlene Orton’s case, the location index was seven blocks away.
