Nocturne (4 page)

Yellow cabs streak like whispered lightning through deserted streets.

A black-and-white photograph of Priscilla Stetson was on an easel outside the entrance to the Cafe Mouton at the Hotel Powell.
Like an identifying shot in a home movie, the script lettering above the photo read
Miss Priscilla Stetson
. Below the photo, the same script lettering announced:

Now Appearing

9:00
p.m
.–2:00
a.m
.

The woman in the photo could have been Svetlana Dyalovich on the cover of
Time
magazine. The same flaxen hair falling straight to her shoulders and cut in bangs on her forehead. The same pale eyes. The
same high Slavic cheekbones. The same imperial nose and confident smile.

The woman sitting at the piano was perhaps thirty years old, dressed in a long black gown with a risky décolletage. A creamy
white expanse of flesh from bosom to neck was interrupted at the throat by a silver choker studded with black and white stones.
She was singing “Gently, Sweetly” when the detectives came in and took stools at the bar. There were perhaps two dozen people
sitting at tables scattered around the smallish candlelit room. It was twenty minutes to two in the morning.

Here with a kiss

In the mist on the shore

Sip from my lips

And whisper

I adore you …

Gently,

Sweetly
,

Ever so completely,

Take me,

Make me

Yours
.

Priscilla Stetson struck the final chord of the song, bent her head, and looked reverently at her hands spread on the keys.
There was a spatter of warm applause. “Thank you,” she whispered into the piano mike. “Thank you very much.” Raising her head,
tossing the long blond hair. “I’ll be taking a short break before the last set, so if you’d like to order anything before
closing, now’s your chance.” A wide smile, a wink. She played a little signature riff, rose, and was walking toward a table
where two burly men sat alone, when the detectives came off their stools to intercept her.

“Miss Stetson?” Carella said.

She turned, smiling, the performer ready to greet an admirer. In high-heeled pumps, she was perhaps five-eight, five-nine.
Her blue-gray eyes were almost level with his.

“Detective Carella,” he said. “This is my partner, Detective Hawes.”

“Yes?”

“Miss Stetson,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but …”

“My grandmother,” she said at once, looking certain rather than alarmed.

“Yes. I’m sorry. She’s dead.”

She nodded.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did she fall in the bathtub again?”

“No, she was shot.”

“Shot? My grandmother?”

“I’m sorry,” Carella said.

“Jesus, shot,” Priscilla said. “Why would …?” She shook her head again. “Well, this city,” she said. “Where’d it happen? On
the street someplace?”

“No. In her apartment. It may have been a burglar.”

Or maybe not, Hawes thought, but said nothing, just allowed Carella to continue carrying the ball. This was the hardest part
of police work, informing the relatives of a victim that something terrible had happened. Carella was doing a fine job, thanks,
no sense interrupting him. Not at a quarter to two in the morning, when the whole damn world was asleep.

“Was she drunk?” Priscilla asked.

Flat out.

“There hasn’t been an autopsy yet,” Carella said.

“She was probably drunk,” Priscilla said.

“We’ll let you know,” Carella said. It came out more harshly than he’d intended. Or maybe it came out exactly as he’d intended.
“Miss Stetson,” he said, “if this is what it looks like, a burglar surprised during the commission of a felony, then we’re
looking for a needle in a haystack. Because it would’ve been a random thing, you see.”

“Yes.”

“On the other hand, if this is someone who wanted your grandmother dead, who came into the apartment with the express purpose
of killing her …”

“Nobody wanted her dead,” Priscilla said.

“How do you know that?”

“She was already dead. No one even knew she existed. Why would anyone go to the trouble of shooting her?”

“But someone did, you see.”

“A burglar then. As you said.”

“The problem with that is nothing was stolen.”

“What was there to steal?”

“You tell us.”

“What do you mean?”

“There didn’t seem to be anything of value in the apartment—but was there? Before he broke in?”

“Like what? The Imperial Czar’s crown jewels? My grandmother didn’t have a pot to piss in. Whatever she got from welfare,
she spent on booze. She was drunk morning, noon and night. She was a pathetic, whining old bitch, a has-been with nothing
of value but her memories. I hated her.”

But tell us how you really feel, Carella thought.

He didn’t much like this young woman with her inherited good looks and her acquired big-city, wiseass manner. He would just
as soon not be here talking to her, but he didn’t like burglaries that turned into murders, especially if maybe they weren’t
burglaries in the first place. So even if it meant pulling teeth, he was going to learn something about her grandmother, anything
about her grandmother that might put this thing to rest one way or another. If someone had wanted her dead, fine, they’d go
looking for that someone till hell froze over. If not, they’d go back to the squadroom and wait until a month from now, a
year from now, five years from now, when some junkie burglar got arrested and confessed to having killed an old lady back
when you and I were young, Maggie. Meanwhile …

“Anyone else feel the way you do?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You said you hated her.”

“Oh, what? Did
I
kill her? Come on. Please.”

“You okay, Priss?”

Carella turned at once, startled. The man standing at his elbow was one of the two Priscilla had been heading to join when
they’d intercepted her. Even before he noticed the gun in a holster under the man’s jacket, Carella would have tapped him
for either a bodyguard or a mobster. Or maybe both. Some six-four and weighing in at a possible two-twenty, he stood balanced
on the balls of his feet, hands dangling half-clenched at his sides, a pose that warned Carella he could take him out in a
minute if he had to. Carella believed it.

“I’m fine, Georgie,” Priscilla said.

Georgie, Carella thought, and braced himself when he saw the other man getting up from the table and moving toward them. Hawes
was suddenly alert, too.

“Because if these gentlemen are disturbing you …”

Carella flashed the tin, hoping to end all discussion.

“We’re police officers,” he said.

Georgie looked at the shield, unimpressed.

“You got a problem here, Georgie?” the other man said, approaching. Georgie’s twin, no doubt. Similarly dressed, down to the
hardware under the wide-shouldered suit jacket. Hawes flashed
his
shield, too. It never hurt to make the same point twice.

“Police officers,” he said.

Must be an echo in this place, Carella thought.

“Is Miss Stetson in some kind of trouble?” Georgie’s twin asked. Two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and bone draped in
Giorgio Armani threads. No broken nose, but otherwise the stereotype was complete.

“Miss Stetson’s grandmother was killed,” Hawes said calmly. “Everything’s under control here. Why don’t you just go back to
your table, hm?”

A buzz was starting in the room now. Four big guys surrounding the room’s star, looked like there might be some kind of trouble
here. One thing people in this city didn’t much care for was trouble. First whiff of trouble, people in this city picked up
their skirts and ran for the hills. Even out-of-towners in this city (which some of the people in the room looked like), even
foreigners in the city (which some of the other people in the room looked like), the minute they caught that first faint whiff
of trouble brewing, they were out of here, man.
Miss Priscilla Stetson, Now Appearing
9:00
p.m
.–2:00
a.m
. was in imminent danger of playing her last set to an empty room. She suddenly remembered the time. “I’m on,” she said. “We’ll
talk later,” and left the four men standing there with their thumbs up their asses.

Like most macho fools who display their manhood to no avail, the men stood glaring at each other a moment longer, and then
mentally flexed their muscles with a few seconds of eye-lock before the two cops went back to the bar and the two gun-toting
whatever-they-weres went back to their table. Priscilla, professionally aloof to whatever masculine urges were surfacing here,
warmly sang a set consisting of “My Funny Valentine,” “My Romance,” “If I Loved You” and “Sweet and Lovely.” A woman sitting
at one of the tables asked her escort why they didn’t write love songs like that anymore, and he said, “Because now they write
hate songs.”

It was 2:00
a.m
.

Either Georgie (or his twin brother Frankie or Nunzio or Dominick or Foongie) asked Priscilla why she hadn’t played the theme
song from
The Godfather
tonight. She sweetly told them no one had requested it, kissed them both on their respective cheeks and simultaneously kissed
them off. Big detectives that they were, neither Carella nor Hawes yet knew whether they were bodyguards or wiseguys. Priscilla
came to the bar.

“Too late for a glass of champagne?” she asked the bartender.

He knew she was kidding; he poured one in a flute. Dispersing guests came over to tell Priscilla how terrific she’d been.
Graciously, she thanked them all and sent them on their early morning way. Priscilla wasn’t a star, she was just a good singer
in a small café in a modest hotel, but she carried herself well. They could tell by the way she merely sipped at the champagne
that she wasn’t a big drinker. Maybe her grandmother had something to do with that. Which brought them back to the corpse
in the shabby mink coat.

“I told you,” Priscilla said. “All her friends are dead. I couldn’t give you their names if I wanted to.”

“How about enemies?” Carella asked. “All of them dead, too?”

“My grandmother was a lonely old woman living alone. She had no friends, she had no enemies. Period.”

“So it had to be a burglar, right?” Hawes asked.

Priscilla looked at him as if discovering him for the first time. Looked him up and down. Red hair with white streak, size
twelve gunboats.

“That’s your job, isn’t it?” she asked coolly. “Determining whether it was a burglar or not?”

“And, by the way, she did have a friend,” Carella corrected.

“Oh?”

“Woman down the hall. Played her old records for her.”

“Please. She played those old 78s for anyone who’d listen.”

“Ever meet her?”

“Who?”

“Woman named Karen Todd. Lived down the hall from your grandmother.”

“No.”

“When’s the last time you saw her alive?” Hawes asked.

“We didn’t get along.”

“So we understand. When did you see her last?”

“Must’ve been around Eastertime.”

“Long time ago.”

“Yeah,” she said, and fell suddenly silent. “I guess I’ll have to call my mother, huh?” she asked.

“Might be a good idea,” Carella said.

“Let her know what happened.”

“Mm.”

“What time is it in London?”

“I don’t know,” Carella said.

“Five or six hours ahead, is that it?”

Hawes shook his head, shrugged.

Karen fell silent again.

The champagne glass was empty now.

“Why’d you hate her?” Carella asked.

“For what she did to herself.”

“She didn’t cause the arthritis,” Hawes said.

“She caused the alcoholism.”

“Which came first?”

“Who knows? Who cares? She was one of the greats. She ended up a nobody.”

“Enemies,” Carella said again.

“I don’t know of any.”

“So it had to be a burglar,” Hawes said again.

“Who cares what it was?” Priscilla asked.

“We do,” Carella said.

It was time to stop the clock.

Time was running by too fast, someone out there had killed her, and time was on his side, her side, whoever’s side. The faster
the minutes went by, the greater would become the distance between him, her, whomever and the cops. So it was time to stop
the clock, hardly a difficult feat here in the old Eight-Seven, time to pause for a moment, and reflect, time to make a few
phone calls, time to call time out.

Carella called home.

When he’d left there at eleven last night, his son Mark was burning up with a hundred-and-two-degree fever and the doctor
was on the way. Fanny Knowles, the Carella housekeeper, picked up on the third ring.

“Fanny,” he said, “hi. Did I wake you?”

“Let me get her,” Fanny said.

He waited. His wife could neither speak nor hear. There was a TDD telephone answering device in the house, but typing out
long messages was time-consuming, tedious, and often frustrating. Better that Teddy should sign and Fanny should translate.
He waited.

“Okay,” Fanny said at last.

“What’d the doctor say?”

“It’s nothing serious,” Fanny said. “He thinks it’s the flu.”

“What does Teddy think?”

“Let me ask her.”

There was a silence on the line. Fanny signing, Teddy responding. He visualized both women in their nightgowns. Fanny some
five feet five inches tall, a stout Irish woman with red hair and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, fingers flying in the language Teddy
had taught her. Teddy an inch taller, a beautiful woman with raven-black hair and eyes as dark as loam, fingers flying even
faster because she’d been doing this from when she was a child. Fanny was back on the line.

“She says what worried her most was when he started shakin like a leaf all over. But he’s all right now. The fever’s come
down, she thinks the doctor’s right, it’s only the flu. She’s going to sleep in his room, she says, just in case. When will
you be home, she wants to know.”