“Why? Cause I ain’t drunk?”
“That’s the kind of remark can get you in trouble,” Monoghan said, wagging his finger under Ollie’s nose.
“I once bit off a guy’s finger, was doing that,” Ollie said, and grinned like a shark.
“Bite this a while,” Monoghan said.
“Good thing the piano teacher’s already gone,” Ollie said, shaking his head in dismay.
“Who’s in charge here?” one of the technicians asked from the doorway.
“Well look who’s here!” Ollie said.
“Keep us advised,” Monoghan said.
You fat bastard, he thought, but did not say.
That Wednesday morning, at a few minutes past eleven, Arthur Brown knocked on the door to Cynthia Keating’s apartment.
“Yes, who is it?” she asked.
“Police,” Brown said.
“Oh,” she said. There was a long silence. “Just a minute,” she said.
They heard a latch turning, tumblers falling. The door opened a crack, held by a security chain. Cynthia peered out at them.
“I don’t know you,” she said.
Brown held up his shield.
“Detective Brown,” he said. “Eighty-seventh Squad.”
“I already spoke to the others,” she said.
“We have a few more questions, ma’am.”
“Is this legal?”
“May we come in, please?”
“Just a second,” she said, and closed the door to take off the chain.
She opened it again, said, “Come in,” and preceded them into the apartment.
“This better be legal,” she said.
“Ma’am,” Kling said, “do you know a man named John Bridges?”
“No. Let me see your badge, too,” she said.
Kling fished out a small leather holder, and flashed the gold and blueenameled shield.
“Excuse me,” she said, and went directly to the telephone on the kitchen wall. She dialed a number, waited, listening, and then said, “Mr Alexander, please. Cynthia Keating.” She waited again. “Todd,” she said, “the police are here. What’s your advice?” She listened again, nodded, kept listening, finally said, “Thanks, Todd, talk to you,” and hung up.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “unless you have a warrant for my arrest, my attorney suggests you take a walk.”
There was something very comforting about being alone at last in the dead girl’s apartment. First of all, the silence. This city, the one thing you could never find anyplace was peace and quiet. There were always sirens going, day and night, police or ambulance, and there were car horns honking, mostly taxicabs, foreigners from India or Pakistan leaning on their horns day and night because they were remembering how fast their camels used to race across the desert sands where there were no traffic lights. Noisiest damn city in the entire universe, this city. Ollie much preferred the silence here in the dead girl’s apartment.
He sometimes felt if he hung around a dead person’s apartment long enough, he would pick up the vibrations of the killer. Get into his or her skin somehow. He had read a story once-he hated reading-where the theory was the image of a person’s murderer would be left on the person’s eyeballs, the retina, whatever. Total bullshit. But the silence in a victim’s apartment was almost palpable, and he gave real credence to the notion that if he stood there long enough, in the silence, the vibrations of the killer would seep into his bones, though to tell the truth this had never happened to him.
Nonetheless, he stood stock still at the foot of the dead girl’s bed now, imagining her as he’d first seen her on the kitchen floor, knife in her chest, trying to feel what the killer had felt while he was stabbing her, trying to get into his skin. Nothing happened. Ollie sighed, farted, and began his solitary search of Althea Cleary’s apartment.
What he hoped he definitely would not find was her parents’ names.
He did not want to have to call them personally and tell them their daughter was dead. He wasn’t good at such stuff. To Ollie, when a person was dead he was dead, and you didn’t go around wringing your hands or tearing out your hair. He couldn’t think of a single dead person he missed, including his own mother and father. He guessed if his sister Isabelle died, he would miss her a little, but not enough to be the one who got up and said some kind words about her at the funeral service because to tell the truth he couldn’t think of a single kind thing he might care to say about her, dead or alive.
Like most living people, Isabelle Weeks was a pain in the ass She once told him he was a bigot. He told her to go fuck herself, girlfriend.
