The Frumious Bandersnatch полностью

Apparently, the man on the left possessed a normal walking pattern. That is to say, an imaginary line drawn in the direction of his walk had run through the inner edges of his heel prints. The distance between the footprints of a man walking slowly would be about twenty-seven inches. The distance for a running man would be forty inches. A man walking fast would measure thirty-five inches between footprints. The guy on the left had been moving very fast. Thirty-three inches between footprints. But it was a normal walking pattern, and not a broken one.

The guy on the right, however—the one who’d rifle-stocked the black dancer and slapped Tamar Valparaiso—had been moving more slowly, twenty-eight inches between footprints. And his walking line indicated that he was partially leaning on his left foot and slightly dragging the right foot.

“Leaning?” Endicott said.

“Dragging?” Corcoran said.

Carella almost said “Shhhhh.”

Absent any perfectly flat footprints for the right foot,Hooper’s report went on,and given the slower gait and broken walking line, it would be safe to conclude that the suspect sustained a past injury to the right leg that manifests itself now in an existent noticeable limp.

“That’s what it was!” Carella told them.

He was referring to what he’d noticed on the tape, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint until just this minute. None of the others knew what the hell he was talking about.

“So what do we do?” Endicott asked. “Put out a medical alert?”

“The report says ‘past injury,’ ” Corcoran said.

“How far in the past? Could’ve been last week.”

“A physician’s bulletin can’t hurt,” Carella said.

“You want to take care of that?” Corcoran suggested.

And all at once, Carella got it.

He was going to be the errand boy.

“What’s my role here going to be?” he asked. Flat out. Head to head.

“What would you like it to be?” Corcoran asked right back. Straight on. Toe to toe.

“I don’t want to be a gopher, that’s for sure.”

“Who says that’s what we want?”

“What do you want?”

“I think it’s what I want that counts, isn’t it?” Loomis said, stepping in. “I’m the one those men will be contacting,I’m the one they’ll be expecting to pay the ransom, whatever that’s going to be. If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I believe Detective Carella is as qualified as any man in this room to handle whatever may come up in the next few days. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t assign him to running out for coffee and sandwiches.”

“I’d be happy to put out that physician’s alert,” Carella said.

“Thank you, Steve,” Loomis said.

“I’ll get someone in the cubbies to do it, don’t sweat it,” Corcoran said.

“Whoever does it, let’s get it done, ” Endicott said, reminding everyone that he was the SAC around here. “Let’s take a look at these DD reports, see if anything pops out at us. Steve, you want to walk us through?”

THE WHOLE IDEA of this thing was to keep the girl alive for forty-eight hours. That was all the time they needed.

Avery had got all the fake stuff for the gig from a man he’d done business with before, a purveyor of false identity documents like social security cards, birth certificates, divorce decrees, gun permits, college diplomas, drivers’ licenses, press credentials, and of course credit cards that actually worked when you used them. The man’s name was Benny Lu, or at least that was the name he used here in the United States, preferring the nickname to the full Benjamin Lu that was on his Hong Kong birth certificate, if even that was real. Benny had migrated to the United States four years ago, after he’d almost been busted by Hong Kong’s ICAC.

Avery had met him two and a half years ago, when he’d needed several false documents in order to casually prove to a certain rich fat lady in Palm Beach that he was, in fact, one Judson Fears of Gloucester County, Virginia, before she would let him into her luxurious waterfront mansion and incidentally her bed, the suspicious old bitch. He had later run off with $200,000 worth of her nice jewelry, thank you, but it served her right for not accepting him at face value, and besides, the jewelry was insured.

“I used to work in a Hong Kong restaurant,” Benny told him the first time they met. Benny was tall and slender, with a droll smile and eyes that always seemed amused. He had the long narrow fingers of a Flower Dancer, precious assets in the delicate operations he performed. “I was making coolie wages,” he told Avery, “until I realized I was in a position to be of valuable assistance to certain people who had need of certain information.”

Avery thought it odd that a Chinese man would use an expression like “coolie wages,” but he made no comment because he believed it was important for a person to listen carefully while he was being educated.