The playground across the street from the brownstone was deserted. Raindrops plinked on the metal swings and slides. This was an alternate-side-of-the-street parking zone. Water ran in sheets off the streamlined surfaces of the cars lining the curb that bordered the fenced-in playground. Carella found a spot dangerously close to a fire hydrant, threw down the visor with its police department logo, locked the car, and began running up the street in the rain.
He'd been a cop too long a time not to have noticed and recognized at once the two men sitting in a sedan parked across the street from the brownstone. He went over to the car, knocked on the passenger-side window. The window rolled down.
"Yeah?" the man sitting there said.
"Carella, the Eight-Seven," he said, showing his shield, shoulders hunched against the rain. "What's happening?"
"Get in," the man said.
Carella opened the rear door and climbed in out of the rain. Rain beat on the roof of the car. Rainsnakes trailed down the windows.
"Peters, the Two-One," the man behind the wheel said.
"Macmillen," his partner said.
Both men were unshaven. It was a look detectives cultivated when they were on a plant. Made them look overworked and underpaid. Which they were, anyway, even without the beard stubble.
"We got cameras rolling in the van up ahead," Peters said, nodding with his head toward the windshield. Through the falling rain, Carella could make out a green van parked just ahead of the car. The words hi-hat dry cleaning were lettered across the back panel, just below the painted-over rear window.
"Been sitting the building for a week now," Macmillen said.
"Which one?"
"The brownstone," Peters said.
"Why? What's going on over there?" Carella asked.
"Cocaine's going on over there," Macmillen said.
It was Monday morning, and all the Monday-morning quarterbacks were out. Or at least one of them. His name was Lieutenant Peter Byrnes, and he was telling his assembled detectives what he hoped they should have known by now.
"When you're stuck," he said, "you go back to the beginning. You start where it started."
He was sitting behind his desk in the corner office he warranted as commander of the 87th Squad, a compact man with silvering hair and no-nonsense flinty-blue eyes. There were six detectives in the office with him. Four of them had already given him rundowns on the various cases they were investigating. The big case had waited patiently in the wings till now. The big case was multiple murder, the tap-dancing, singing, piano-playing star of this here little follies. Like a network television executive lecturing six veteran screenwriters on basics like motivation and such, the lieutenant was telling his men how to conduct their business.
"This case started with the dead girl," he said.
Susan Brauer. The dead girl. Twenty-two years old, a girl for sure, though Arthur Schumacher had considered her a woman for sure.
"And that's where you gotta start all over again," Byrnes said. "With the dead girl."
"You want my opinion," Andy Parker said, "you already got yourperp."
Carella was thinking the same thing.
"Your perp's the hippie daughter," Parker said.
Exactly, Carella thought.
Looking at Parker in his rumpled suit, wrinkled shirt, and stained tie, his cheeks and jowls unshaven, Carella remembered for the hundredth time the two cops planted outside that brownstone downtown. He still hadn't talked to his brother-in-law because he hadn't yet figured out how the hell to handle this. Nor had he yet told Angela that her husband's sudden behavioral changes had nothing whatever to do with sex with a perfect stranger, but were instead attributable to what most cocaine addicts considered far more satisfying than even the best sex. He was hoping neither Peters nor Macmillen had pictures of Tommy marching in and out of a house under surveillance for drugs; how could he have been so goddamn dumb?
"… the will for a quarter of the estate to begin with," Parker was saying. "Reason enough to kill the old …"
"That isn't starting with the dead girl," Byrnes reminded him.
"The dead girl was a smoke screen, pure and simple," Parker said breezily and confidently.
"Was she in the will?" Kling asked. "The dead girl?"
His mind was on Eileen Burke. On Monday mornings, it was sometimes difficult to get back to the business at hand, especially when the business happened to be crime every day of the year.
"No," Brown said. "Only people in the will are the two daughters, the present wife …"
"Now dead herself," Parker said knowingly.
". . . the vet, and the pet-shop lady," Brown concluded.
"For how much?" Hawes asked. "Those two?"
"Ten grand each," Carella said.
Hawes nodded in dismissal.
"The point is," Parker said, "between them, the two kids are up for fifty percent of the estate. If that ain't a good-enough motive …"
"How much did you say?" Hawes asked again. "The estate?"
"What the hell are you this morning?" Parker asked. "An accountant?"
"I want to know what the estate was, okay?" Hawes said.
