The Pusher полностью

"Goodbye," Byrnes said, and he hung up. He sometimes wondered about Harriet, who was, by all civilized standards, a most intelligent woman. She could with the skill of an accountant balance a budget or wade through pages and pages of household figures. She had coped with a policeman-husband who was very rarely home, and had managed to raise a son almost singlehanded. And Larry, despite his damned un-Byrnesian leaning toward dramatics, was certainly a lad to be proud of. Yes, Harriet was capable, level-headed, and good in bed most of the time.

And yet, on the other hand, something like this roast beef thing could throw her into a confused frenzy.

Women. Byrnes would never understand them.

Sighing heavily, he turned back to his work. He was reading through Carella's DD report on the dead boy when the knock sounded on his door.

"Come," Byrnes said.

The door opened. Hal Willis came into the room.

"What is it, Hal?" Byrnes asked.

"Well, this is a weird one," Willis said. He was a small man, a man who-by comparison with the other precinct bulls-looked like a jockey. He had smiling brown eyes, and a face that always looked interested, and he also had a knowledge of judo that had knocked many a cheap thief on his back.

"Weird how?" Byrnes asked.

"Desk sergeant put this call through. I took it. But the guy won't speak to anyone but you."

"Who is he?"

"Well, that's it. He wouldn't give his name."

"Tell him to go to hell," Byrnes said.

"Lieutenant, he said it's got something to do with the Hernandez case."

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

Byrnes thought for a moment, "All right," he said at last. "Have the call switched to my wire."

It was not that Steve Carella had any theories.

It was simply that the situation stank to high heaven.

Anнbal Hernandez had been found dead at two o'clock on the morning of December 18th. That had been a Monday morning, and now it was Wednesday afternoon, two days later-and the situation still stank to high heaven.

The coroner had reported that Hernandez died of an overdose of heroin, which was not an unseemly way for a hophead to meet his end. The syringe lying next to Hernandez' hands had been scrutinized for latent prints, and those prints were now being compared with the prints lifted from Hernandez' dead fingers.

Carella, with dead certainty, was sure the prints would not match. Someone had tied that rope around Hernandez' neck after he was dead, and Carella was willing to bet that the same person had used that syringe to administer the fatal dose of heroin.

Which situation brought up a few problems. Which problems combined to lend the entire situation its air of putrefaction.

For assuming that someone wanted Hernandez dead, an assumption that seemed to be well-founded, and further assuming the someone had used an overloaded syringe of heroin as his murder weapon, why then was the murder weapon not removed from the scene of the crime?

Or why then, for that matter, was the body then hoisted by its own petard, more or less, in an attempt to stimulate a hanging suicide?

These were the knotty trivialities that disturbed the normal thinking of Detective Steve Carella. He knew, of course, that there could be a thousand and one motives for murder in the tangled world of drug addiction. He knew, too, that someone unfamiliar with the ways of the coroner's office might innocently hope to palm off a poisoning as a hanging. But he further knew that every man and boy in the United States had been raised on the Fingerprint Legend. Commit a crime? Wipe off the prints, boy. The prints had not been wiped from the syringe. The prints were there, as big as life, waiting to be lifted and studied. The syringe was there, too, and if someone were trying to palm off a hanging, would he leave a syringe around? Could he be so stupid as to believe the cops wouldn't automatically connect the syringe to a possible death by overdose?

Something stank.

Everything stank.

Carella had a sensitive nose and perhaps a sensitive mind. He walked the streets of the precinct, and he thought, and he wondered where he should begin because the right beginning was very often the most important time-saving device in detective work. And whereas he was, at the moment, primarily concerned with the Hernandez case, he couldn't very well forget the fact that he was a cop being paid to enforce law twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

When he saw the automobile parked at the curb near Grover Park, he gave it but a cursory glance. Were he an ordinary citizen out for a midafternoon promenade, the cursory glance would have sufficed. Because he was a law-enforcing cop, he took a second glance.