The technician, while he had Arlene’s phone apart, could just as easily have installed a bug that would have picked up any voices in the living room and would also have recorded Arlene’s half of any telephone conversations. He chose instead to place his bug in the bookcase on the opposite side of the room. The bug was a small FM transmitter with a battery-powered mike that needed to be changed every twenty-four hours. It operated on the same frequency as the recording machine locked into it, a machine that was voice-actuated and that would begin taping whenever anyone began speaking in the apartment. The technician would have preferred running his own wires, rather than having to worry about changing a battery every twenty-four hours. But running wires meant that you had to pick a place to run them
So the technician settled upon the battery-powered mike and resigned himself to the fact that every twenty-four hours he and his partner would have to get into the apartment somehow to change the goddamn batteries. In all, there would be four sets of batteries to change because the technician was planting four bugs in the apartment: one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one in the bathroom, and one in the living room. While he worked, his partner was down in the lobby with a walkie-talkie in his coat pocket, ready to let him know the moment Arlene Orton came back to the building, and ready to detain her by ruse if necessary. Watching the clock, the technician worked swiftly and silently, hoping the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt would not erupt with his partner’s warning voice. He was not worried about legal action against the city; the court order, in effect, gave him permission to break and enter. He worried only about blowing the surveillance.
In the rear of a panel truck parked at the curb some twelve feet south of the entrance to 812 Crane, Steve Carella sat behind the recording equipment that was locked into the frequency of the four bugs. He knew that in some neighborhoods a phony truck was as readily recognizable as the cop on the beat. Put a man in the back of a fake delivery truck, park the truck on the street and start taking pictures of people going in and out of a candy store suspected of being a numbers drop, and all of a sudden the neighborhood was full of budding stars and starlets, all of whom knew there was a cop-photographer in the back of the truck, all of whom mugged and pranced and emoted shamelessly for the movie camera, while managing to conduct not an iota of business that had anything at all to do with the policy racket. It got discouraging. But Crane Street was in one of the city’s better neighborhoods, where perhaps the citizens were not as wary of cops hiding in the backs of panel trucks doing their dirty watching and listening. Carella sat hopefully with a tuna-fish sandwich and a bottle of beer, prepared to hear and record any sounds that emanated from Arlene’s apartment.
At the bridging point seven blocks away and thirty minutes later, Arthur Brown sat behind equipment that was hooked into the telephone mike, and waited for Arlene Orton’s phone to ring. He was in radio contact with Carella in the back of his phony panel truck and could apprise him of any new development at once.
The first call came at 12:17 P . M . The equipment tripped in automatically, and the spools of tape began recording the conversation while Brown simultaneously monitored it through his headphones.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Arlene?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“Nan.”
“Nan? You sound so different. Do you have a cold or something?”
“Every year at this time. Just before the holidays. Arlene, I’m terribly rushed, I’ll make this short. Do you know Beth’s dress size?”
“A ten, I would guess. Or an eight.”
“Well, which?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you give Danny a ring?”
“Do you have his office number?”
“No, but he’s listed. It’s Reynolds and Abelman. In Calm’s Point.”
“Thank you, darling. Let’s have lunch after the holidays sometime, okay?”
“Love to.”
“I’ll call you. Bye-bye.”
