The detective who engaged the garage attendant in a bullshit conversation about a hit-and-run accident was Steve Carella. The lab technician who posed as a mechanic sent by the Automobile Club to charge a faulty battery was the same man who had wired Arlene Orton’s apartment.
Fletcher’s car was parked in a garage four blocks from his office, a fact determined simply by following him to work that morning of December 24. (Carella had already figured that Fletcher would park the car where he finally
On the sidewalk outside the garage, Carella asked invented questions about a damaged left fender and headlight on a fictitious 1968 Dodge, while upstairs the lab technician was installing his bug in Fletcher’s 1972 Oldsmobile. It would have been simpler and faster to put in a battery-powered FM transmitter similar to those he had installed in Arlene Orton’s apartment, but since batteries needed constant changing, and since access to any given automobile was infinitely more difficult than access to an apartment, he decided on wiring his bug into the car’s electrical system instead. With the hood open, with charge cables going to Fletcher’s battery from his own tow-truck battery, he busily spliced and taped, tucked and tacked. He did not want to put the bug under the dashboard (the easiest spot) because this was wintertime, and the car heater would undoubtedly be in use, and the sensitive microphone would pick up every rattle and rumble of the heater instead of the conversation in the car. So he wedged the microphone into the front cushion, between seat and back, and then ran his wires under the car rug, and up under the dashboard, and finally into the electrical system. Within the city limits, the microphone would effectively broadcast any sound in the car for a distance of little more than a block, which meant that Fletcher’s Oldsmobile would have to be closely followed by the monitoring unmarked police sedan. If Fletcher left the city, as he planned to do tonight when he took Arlene to The Chandeliers, the effective range of the transmitter on the open road would be about a quarter of a mile. In either case, the listener-pursuer had his work cut out for him.
On the sidewalk, Carella saw the technician drive out in his battered tow truck, abruptly thanked the garage attendant for his time, and headed back to the squadroom.
The holiday was starting in earnest and so, in keeping with the conventions of that festive season, the boys of the 87th Squad held their annual Christmas party at 4 P . M . that afternoon. The starting time for the party was entirely arbitrary, since it depended on when the squad’s guests began dropping in. The guests, unlike those to be found at most other Christmas parties in the city, were in the crime business, mainly because the hosts were in that same business. Most of the guests were shoplifters. Some of them were pickpockets. A few of them were drunks. One of them was a murderer.
The shoplifters had been arrested in department stores scattered throughout the precinct, the Christmas shopping season being a good time to lift merchandise, Christmas Eve being the last possible day to practice the art in stores still jammed to the rafters. The shoplifters plied their trade in various ways. A skinny lady shoplifter named Hester Brady, for example, came into the squadroom looking like a pregnant lady. Her pregnancy had been caused by stuffing some two hundred dollars worth of merchandise into the overlarge bloomers she wore under her dress, a risky procedure unless one is skilled at lift, grab, stuff, drop the skirt, move to the next aisle, advance in the space of twenty minutes from a sweet Irish virgin to a lady eight months along; such are the vagaries of birth control.
