Hail to the Chief (87th Precinct), page 7
“Of what?” Carella asked.
“Of getting married. I mean, it’s…well…it’s a very serious commitment, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Carella said. He could not quite understand Kling’s hesitancy. If he really wanted to marry Gussie, why the doubts? And if there were doubts, then did he really want to marry her?
“What’s it like?” Kling asked.
“What’s what like?”
“Being married.”
“I can only tell you what it’s like being married to Teddy,” Carella said.
“Yeah, what’s it like?”
“It’s wonderful.”
“Mmm,” Kling said. “Because, suppose you get married and then you find out it isn’t the same as when you weren’t married?”
“What isn’t the same?”
“Everything.”
“Like what?”
“Like, well, for example, suppose, well, that, well, the sex isn’t the same?”
“Why should it be any different?”
“I don’t know,” Kling said, and shrugged.
“What’s the marriage certificate got to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Kling said, and shrugged again. “Is it the same? The sex?”
“Sure,” Carella said.
“I don’t mean to get personal…”
“No, no.”
“But it’s the same, huh?”
“Sure, it’s the same.”
“And the rest? I mean, you know, do you still have fun?”
“Fun?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, we have fun.”
“Like before?”
“Better than before.”
“Because we have a lot of fun together,” Kling said. “Augusta and I. A lot of fun.”
“That’s good,” Carella said.
“Yes, it’s very good. That two people can enjoy things together. I think that’s very good, Steve, don’t you?”
“Yes, I think it’s very good when that happens between two people.”
“Not that we don’t have fights,” Kling said.
“Well, everybody has fights. Any two people—”
“Yes, but not too many.”
“No, no.”
“And our…our personal relationship is very good. We’re very good together.”
“Mmm.”
“The sex, I mean,” Kling said quickly, and suddenly seemed very intent on the road ahead. “That’s very good between us.”
“Mmm, well, good. That’s good.”
“Though not always. I mean, sometimes it’s not as good as other times.”
“Yes, well, that’s natural,” Carella said.
“But most of the time…”
“Yes, sure.”
“Most of the time, we really do enjoy it.”
“Sure,” Carella said.
“And we love each other. That’s important.”
“That’s the single most important thing,” Carella said. “Yes, I think so.”
“No question. It is the single most important thing,” Kling said. “It’s what makes everything else seem right. The decisions we make together, the things we do together, even the fights we have together. It’s the fact that we love each other…well…That’s what makes it work, you see.”
“Yes,” Carella said.
“So you think I should marry her?”
“It sounds like you’re married already,” Carella said.
Kling turned abruptly from the wheel to see whether or not Carella was smiling. Carella was not. He was hunched on the seat with his feet propped up against the clattering heater, and his hands tucked under his arms, and his chin ducked into the upturned collar of his coat.
“I suppose it is sort of like being married,” Kling said, turning his attention to the road again. “But not exactly.”
“Well, how’s it any different?” Carella said.
“Well, I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.”
“Well, I don’t see any difference.”
“Then why should we get married?” Kling asked.
“Jesus, Bert, I don’t know,” Carella said. “If you want to get married, get married. If you don’t, then stay the way you are.”
“Why’d you get married?”
Carella thought for a long time. Then he said, “Because I couldn’t bear the thought of any other man ever touching Teddy.”
Kling nodded.
He said nothing more all the way to Turman.
The detective’s name was Al Grundy. He first took them to the hospital mortuary to show them the girl’s body, and then he drove them out to where the corpse had been found. The initial discovery had been made by two teenage boys cutting through the woods on their way to school. One of them had stayed with the dead girl, nervously waiting some ten feet from where the body lay partially covered with leaves that had fallen in October and were now moldering and wet. The other had raced to the nearest pay telephone and called the police, who responded within four minutes. There were tire tracks in the wet leaves, and it was assumed that the body had been transported to this isolated glade from someplace else.
“Think it’s the girl you’re looking for?” Grundy asked.
He was a huge black-haired man with light-blue eyes, freckles spattered across the bridge of his nose. He could not have been older than twenty-five or -six. Standing beside him, Kling suddenly felt ancient, suddenly felt it was time he did get married, and had kids, and became a grandfather.
“Maybe,” Carella said. “Have you got a last name for her? Was she carrying any identification?”
“Nothing but the locket on her wrist.”
“No handbag?”
“Nothing.”
“Any houses nearby?”
“Just the one over the knoll there. Doubt if anyone could’ve seen anything from there. Because of the way the ground slopes.”
“The road we came in on, is that the only access road?”
“Yeah. Route 14. We traced the tire tracks back to where they must’ve drove in,” Grundy said. “The mud and the leaves made that easy. But there’s nothing on the road itself that would indicate which direction they came from.”
“What about the kids who found her? Have you talked to them?”
“Oh, yeah. They’re clean, I think. You never can tell, but these kids had two things going for them: one, they called the cops, and two, they both looked scared shitless.”
“What’d the coroner have to say about the time of death?”
“Set it at sometime between ten and twelve P.M. last night. She’d been beaten badly, bleeding welts across her back, looked like somebody whipped her before cutting her throat. No sexual assault. Vaginal vault is clean of semen.”
“Mind if we talk to the people in the house up there?”
“Be my guest,” Grundy said.
The “people” in the house up there turned out to be only one person. His name was Rodney Sack, and he was seventy-six years old, and he appeared very frightened by the appearance of detectives in his kitchen. He was just sitting down to breakfast, and was wearing blue denim coveralls, a wool plaid sports shirt, a blue cardigan sweater threadbare at the elbows, and a hearing aid. The hearing aid did not help matters much. His obvious fear made matters even worse.
The detectives were trying to find out exactly who “Midge” was. They had gone through Broughan’s gang files quite thoroughly, and had found no such nickname for any girl-auxiliary member. The scrutiny had not been a simple one; there were records on 153 gangs in West Riverhead alone. The Scarlet Avengers and the Death’s Heads had been involved in hostile combat with many of those gangs since their respective formations three and four years back. Picking out the gang that had decided to do in the leaders of the Avengers and the Heads was rather like picking a dish at a Chinese banquet: everything looked good. So far, the detectives had only two leads. They knew that Andrew Kingsley had been with Eduardo and Constantina Portoles for some time before a person or persons unknown had entered the apartment and killed all three of them. They did not know why Kingsley had been there, or what his relationship with Portoles and his sister had been. They also knew that a girl named Midge, presumably an auxiliary member of the rampaging gang, had supplied them with information, and then had turned up in the next state, two days later, with her throat slit. But who the hell was Midge?
“Notice any unusual traffic in the woods down there last night?” Carella asked Sack.
“No, sir,” Sack said, visibly trembling.
“Any headlights or anything?”
“What would red lights be doing down there in—”
“Headlights. Headlights. Automobile headlights.”
“Oh, headlights,” Sack said. “No, didn’t see no headlights down there.” He tried to light his pipe, and the match fell from his shaking hand. He took another wooden match from the box of kitchen matches, and broke the match striking it. He looked up at the detectives, smiled weakly, and put the pipe aside.
“What are you scared of, Mr. Sack?” Kling asked.
“Me? Nothing. What’ve I got to be scared of?”
“Did you see something down in those woods last night?”
“No, sir, I did not.”
“Where were you last night, Mr. Sack?” Carella said, and realized that both he and Kling were shouting at the old man. Carella’s wife was a deaf-mute, and he never thought of her inability to hear or speak as an affliction. But Sack’s partial deafness was inordinately irritating. Carella suddenly realized that most people were annoyed by the partially deaf, whereas their patience was normally quite generous toward the partially blind, or the crippled. He put the thought aside, certain he would discuss it later with Teddy, her eyes watching his lips intently, her fingers answering in the deaf-mute language they shared, and that he “spoke” fluently and with a distinctive accent all his own. Sack was staring up at him. He was not sure the old man had heard him. “Mr. Sack, where were you…?”
“I heard you, I heard you,” Sack said impatiently, and Carella now saw the other side of the coin, the annoyance of the hard-of-hearing at being subjected to shouting and repetition and constant doubt as to whether they heard what was being said to them.
“Well, where were you?”
“Here.”
“All night?”
“All night, yes.”
“What were you doing between ten o’clock and midnight?”
“Sleeping.”
“What time did you go to bed?”
“Nine o’clock. I go to bed nine o’clock every night.”
“Hear anything unusual down there in the woods?” Kling asked.
“I’m hard of hearing,” Sack said with great dignity. “I wouldn’t have heard a cannon if it went off on the porch.”
“Did you get out of bed any time during the night?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“When?”
“Don’t remember exactly when. Had to go to the toilet, so I got out of bed.”
“Where’s the toilet?” Carella asked.
“Back of the house.”
“Overlooking the woods?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a window in the toilet?”
“Yes.”
“Did you look out that window while you were in there?”
“Don’t recall as I did.”
“Try to recall,” Kling said.
“I suppose I might’ve glanced out there.”
“What’d you see?”
“The woods.”
“Anything in the woods?”
“Trees, bushes.” Sack shrugged.
“Anything else?”
“Animals maybe. Lots of deer come close to the house, foraging.”
“Did you see any animals last night?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“What kind of animals?”
“Well, hard to say. Pretty dark out there except for the—” Sack stopped in midsentence.
“Except for the what?” Carella said.
“Porch light,” Sack said. “Always keep the porch light on.”
“By the porch, do you mean that porch on the front of the house?”
“Yes, that’s the porch.”
“Is there a back porch, Mr. Sack?”
“No, just that front porch there.”
“But you said the toilet is at the back of the house.”
“Well, yes. Yes, that’s where it is.”
“Then what’s the light on the front porch got to do with what you saw or didn’t see from the back?”
Sack blinked, and then suddenly began crying. “I’m an old man,” he said, and fumbled for a handkerchief in the pocket of his coveralls. “I can’t hear worth a shit, and I’m living on my disability pension and what I get from the welfare. I got maybe five, six years left of living, if that much. I don’t want trouble. Please leave me alone. Please.” He blew his nose and dabbed at his eyes, and then put the handkerchief away, even though tears were still running down his cheeks. “Please,” he said.
“Want to tell us what happened last night, Mr. Sack?” Carella said gently.
“Nothing,” Sack said. “I already told you…” He could not go on. A sob strangled the sentence, and he began coughing, and again reached for his handkerchief.
“Did you see headlights down there in the woods, Mr. Sack?”
Sack did not answer.
“Yes or no?”
“I saw headlights,” he said, and sighed heavily. “I’m an old man. Please, I don’t want trouble.”
“What time was this, Mr. Sack? The headlights.”
“Must’ve been about two in the morning.”
“You saw them from the bathroom window?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you do?”
“I should’ve gone back to bed, but I thought…I thought somebody maybe got off the road by accident…and was stuck in the mud down there by the bottom, so I…I put on a pair of pants and a shirt, and my sweater and my lumberjack, and I went down there to see if…if I could offer some assistance. Phone a garage or…I’m an old man, and I’m deaf, but I ain’t worthless. I have some value, you see. I thought I could phone, if the people down there needed help.”
“Go on,” Kling said. He said the two words quite softly, and was not at all sure that Sack heard them.
“I wasn’t carrying no light, I looked for the damn flashlight, but I couldn’t find it. I keep losing things around here, I don’t know what it is. But there was a pretty good moon, and I know those woods like the back of my hand, I was born and raised in this house, I know every inch of them woods. And I made my way down to where the lights were, and…and then I saw what was going on.”
“What was that, Mr. Sack?”
“I said I saw what was going on.”
“Yes, and what did you see?”
“There was a girl laying on the ground in front of the truck. There was blood all over her dress. There was two young boys standing in the headlights near her. They were having an argument.”
“What about?”
“One of them wanted to bury her. He said they’d brought along the shovels so they could bury her. The other one said he wanted to get out of there fast, it was good enough what they’d already done, covered her with leaves.”
“What’d they look like?”
“They were just kids, couldn’t’ve been older than sixteen or seventeen.”
“White or black?”
“White.”
“Did they use names in addressing each other? Did you hear any names?”
“I’m hard of hearing,” Sack said again, “but I think I heard one of them calling the other one ‘Pig.’”
“Pig? P-I-G?”
“That’s right. Pig.”
“Are you sure that’s what he said?”
“I’m not sure, no. But that’s what it sounded like to me.”
“All right, what happened?”
“The one named Pig said he was in charge, and he didn’t want to spend no more time there in the woods. So they got in the truck and drove off.”
“What kind of truck?”
“Old Chevy pickup.”
“Notice the license plate?”
“It was an Isola plate, but I couldn’t make out the numbers on it.”
“When you say old…what year do you mean?”
“’64, ‘65, something like that,”
“What color?”
“Green, it looked like. Or blue. A bluish-green.”
“An open pickup?”
“Yes.”
“Anything in the back of the truck?”
“Nothing I could see. I guess there were shovels in it, because that’s what they were talking about. But I couldn’t see them from where I was.”
“Anything else you remember about the truck? Any dents, any peculiar markings, anything painted on its sides?”
“There was a funny flag painted on the door closest to me.”
“Which door was that?”
“The door on the driver’s side.”
“What kind of flag?”
“I couldn’t make it out. I think it was a flag, it looked like a flag, anyway.”
“What color was it?”
“Red, white, and blue.”
“But it wasn’t an American flag?”
“No, no, I know what the American flag looks like, don’t I? This had a big blue cross on it. Stars, too, now that you mention it. But it wasn’t the Stars and Stripes, that’s for sure. I fought for that flag, I sure as hell ought to know what it looks like. World War One. That’s how come I’m deaf.”
“What’d these boys look like, can you tell us that?”
“Both had dark hair, and both were wearing blue jackets with—Hey, that’s right. That’s right, come to think of it.”
“What’s right, Mr. Sack?”
“That same flag was on the back of their jackets. That’s right. Same damn flag.”
“Uh-huh. How tall were they?”
“Average height.”
“Notice anything else about them? Scars or…?”
“Yeah, one of them was wearing a scarf.”
Carella did not mention that he had said “Scars.” Instead, he picked up on the old man’s recollection, and said, “What color was the scarf?”
“Red.”
“Which one was wearing it? Pig or the other one?”
