Nocturne (5 page)

“Shift’s over at eight, she knows that.”

“She thought, with the lad sick and all …”

“Fanny, we’ve got a homicide. Tell her that.”

He waited.

Fanny came back on the line.

“She says you’ve always got a homicide.”

Carella smiled.

“I’ll be home in six hours,” he said. “Tell her I love her.”

“She loves you too,” Fanny said.

“Did she say that?”

“No, I said it,” Fanny said. “It’s two in the mornin, mister. Can we all go back to bed now?”

“Not me,” Carella said.

Hawes was talking to a Rape Squad cop named Annie Rawles. Annie happened to be in his bed. He was telling her that since he’d
come to work tonight, he’d met a beautiful Mediterranean-looking woman and also a beautiful piano player with long blond hair.

“Is the piano player a woman, too?” Annie asked.

Hawes smiled.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“Just a thirty-eight in a shoulder holster,” Annie said.

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

“Fat Chance Department,” she said.

The clock began ticking again.

Every hour of the day looks the same inside a morgue. That’s because there are no windows and the glare of fluorescent light
is neutral at best. The stench, too, is identical day in and day out, palpable to anyone who walks in from the fresh air outside,
undetectable to the assistant medical examiners who are carving up corpses for autopsy.

Dr. Paul Blaney was a shortish man with a scraggly black mustache and eyes everyone told him were violet, but which he thought
were a pale bluish-gray. He was wearing a bloodstained blue smock and yellow rubber gloves, and was weighing a liver when
the detectives walked in. He immediately plopped the organ into a stainless-steel basin, where it sat looking like the Portnoy
family’s impending dinner. Yanking off one of the gloves, presumably to shake hands, he remembered where the hand had recently
been, and pulled it back abruptly. He knew why the detectives were here. He got directly to the point.

“Two to the heart,” he said. “Both bull’s-eyes, and not a bad title for a movie.”

“I think there was one,” Hawes said.

“Bull’s-Eyes?”

“No, no …”

“You’re thinking of
One-Eyed Jacks
.”

“No,
Two to the Heart
, something like that.”

“
Two for the Road
, you’re thinking of,” Blaney said.

“No, that was a song,” Hawes said.

“That was ‘One for the Road.’ ”

“This was a movie.
Two from the Heart
, maybe.”

“Cause
Two for the Road
was very definitely a movie.”

Carella was looking at them both.

“This had the word ‘heart’ in the title,” Hawes said.

Carella was still looking at them. Everywhere around them were bodies or body parts on tables and countertops. Everywhere
around them was the stink of death.

“Heart, heart,” Blaney said, thinking out loud. “
Heart of Darkness
? Because that became a movie, but it was called
Apocalypse Now
.”

“No, but I think you’re close.”

“Is it Coppola?”

“Carella,” Carella said, wondering why Blaney, whom he’d known for at least a quarter of a century, was getting his name wrong.

“Something Coppola directed?” Blaney asked, ignoring him.

“I don’t know,” Hawes said. “Who’s Coppola?”

“He directed the
Godfather
movies.”

Which reminded Carella of the two hoods in the hotel bar. Which further reminded him of Svetlana’s granddaughter. Which brought
him full circle to why they were here.

“The autopsy,” he reminded Blaney.

“Two to the heart,” Blaney said. “Both of them in a space the size of a half-dollar. Which didn’t take much of a marksman
because the killer was standing quite close.”

“How close?”

“I’d say no more than three, four feet. All the guy did was point and fire. Period.”

“Was she drunk?” Carella asked.

“No. Percentage of alcohol in the brain was point-oh-two, well within the normal range. Urine and blood percentages were similarly
normal.”

“Can you give us a PMI?”

“Around eleven, eleven-thirty last night. Ballpark.”

No postmortem interval was entirely accurate. They all knew that. But Blaney’s educated guess coincided with the time the
man down the hall had heard shots.

“Anything else we should know?” Hawes asked.

“Examination of the skull revealed a schwannoma arising from the vestibular nerve, near the porus acusticus, extending into
both the internal auditory meatus …”

“In English, please,” Carella said.

“An acoustic neuroma …”

“Come on, Paul.”

“In short, a tumor on the auditory nerve. Quite large and cystic, probably causing hearing loss, headache, vertigo, disturbed
sense of balance, unsteadiness of gait, and tinnitus.”

“Tinnitus?”

“Ringing of the ears.”

“Oh.”

“Liquid chromotography of the coagulated blood disclosed a drug called diclofenac, in concentrations indicating therapeutic
doses. But the loose correlation between dosage and concentration is a semi-quantitative process at best. All I can say for
certain is that she was
taking
the drug, not
why
she was taking it.”

“Why do you
think
she was taking it?”

“Well, we don’t normally examine joints in a post, and I haven’t here. But a superficial look at her fingers suggests what
I’m sure a vertebral slice would reveal.”

“And what’s that?”

“Lipping on the anterior visible portion.”

“What’s lipping?”

“Knobby, bumpy, small excrescenses of bone. In short, smooth, asymmetric swellings on the body of the vertebrae.”

“Indicating what?”

“Arthritis?”

“Are you asking?”

“Do you know whether or not she was arthritic?”

“She was.”

“Well, there,” Blaney said.

Hawes was still trying to remember the title of that movie. He asked Sam Grossman if he remembered seeing it.

“I don’t go to movies,” Grossman said.

He was wearing a white lab coat, and standing before a counter covered with test tubes, graduated cylinders, beakers, spatulas,
pipettes and flasks, all of which gave his work space an air of scientific inquiry that seemed in direct contrast to Grossman
himself. A tall, angular man with blue eyes behind dark-framed glasses, he looked more like a New England farmer worried about
drought than he did the precise police captain who headed up the lab.

Some ranking E-flat piano player in the department had undoubtedly decided that the death of a once-famous concert pianist
rated special treatment, hence the dispatch with which Svetlana’s body and personal effects had been sent respectively to
the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office and the lab. The mink coat, the cotton housedress, the pink sweater, the cotton panty
hose, and the bedroom slippers were all on Grossman’s countertop, dutifully tagged and bagged. At another table, one of Grossman’s
assistants sat with her head bent over a microscope. Hawes looked her over. A librarian type, he decided, which he sometimes
found exciting.

“Why do you ask?” Grossman said.

“Cause of death was two to the heart,” Carella said.

“Plenty of blood to support that,” Grossman said, nodding. “All of it hers, by the way. Nobody else bled all over the sweater
and dress. The dress is a cheap cotton
schmatte
you can pick up at any Woolworth’s. The house slippers are imitation leather, probably got
those
in a dime store, too. But the sweater has a designer label in it. And so does the mink. Old, but once worth something.”

Which could have been said of the victim, too, Carella thought.

“Anything else?”

“I just
got
all this stuff,” Grossman said.

“Then when?”

“Later.”

“When later?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Sooner.”

“A magician I’m not,” Grossman said.

They went back to the apartment again.

The yellow
crime scene
tapes were still up. A uniformed cop stood on the stoop downstairs, his hands behind his back, peering out at the deserted
street. It was bitterly cold. He was wearing earmuffs and a heavy-duty overcoat, but he still looked frozen to death. They
identified themselves and went upstairs. Another of the blues was on duty outside the door to apartment 3A. A cardboard
crime scene
card was taped to the door behind him. The door was padlocked. He produced a key when they identified themselves.

Hidden under a pile of neatly pressed and folded, lace-trimmed silk underwear at the back of the bottom drawer in her dresser,
they found another candy tin.

There was a savings account passbook in it.

The book showed a withdrawal yesterday of an even one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, leaving a balance of sixteen
dollars and twelve cents. The withdrawal slip was inserted in the passbook at the page that recorded the transaction. The
date and time on the slip were January 20, 10:27
a.m
.

This would have been half an hour before Svetlana Dyalovich went downstairs to buy a fifth of Four Roses.

According to Blaney and the man down the hall, she was killed some twelve hours later.

The man in apartment 3D did not enjoy being awakened at ten minutes to three in the morning. He was wearing only pajamas when
he grumblingly unlocked the door for them, but he quickly put on a woolen robe, and, still grumbling, led the detectives into
the apartment’s small kitchen. A tiny window over the sink was rimed with frost. Outside, they could hear the wind howling.
They kept on their coats and gloves.

The man, whose name was Gregory Turner, went to the stove, opened the oven door, and lighted the gas jets. He left the door
open. In a few moments, they could feel heat beginning to seep into the kitchen. Turner put up a pot of coffee. A short while
later, while he was pouring for them, they took off the coats and gloves.

He was sixty-nine years old, he told them, a creature of impeccable habit, set in his ways. Got up to pee every night at three-thirty.
They’d got him out of bed forty minutes early, he didn’t like this break in his routine. Hoped he could fall back asleep again
after they were done with him here and he had his nocturnal pee. For all his grumbling, though, he seemed cooperative, even
hospitable. Like buddies about to go on an early morning fishing trip, the three men sat around the oilcloth-covered kitchen
table sipping coffee. Their hands were warm around the steaming cups. Heat poured from the oven. Springtime didn’t seem all
that far away.

“I hated those records she played day and night,” he told them. “Sounded like somebody
practicing
. All classical music sounds that way to me. How can anyone make any sense of it? I like swing, do you know what swing is?
Before your time, swing. I’m sixty-nine years old, did I tell you that? Get up to pee regular every night at three-thirty
in the morning, go back to sleep again till eight, get up, have my breakfast, go for a long walk. Jenny used to go with me
before she died last year. My wife. Jenny. We’d walk together in the park, rain or shine. Settled a lot of our problems on
those walks. Talked them out. Well, I don’t have any problems now she’s gone. But I miss her like the devil.”

He sighed heavily, freshened the coffee in his cup.

“More?” he asked.

“Thank you, no,” Carella said.

“Just a drop,” Hawes said.

“Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, that was swing. Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers, wonderful stuff back then. You had a new song
come out, maybe six, seven bands covered it. Best record usually was the one made the charts. ‘Blues in the Night’ came out,
there must’ve been a dozen different big-band versions of it. Well, that was some song. Johnny Mercer wrote that song. You
ever hear of Johnny Mercer?”

Both detectives shook their heads.

“He wrote that song,” Turner said. “Woody Herman had the best record of that song. That was some song.” He began singing it.
His voice, thin and frail, filled the stillness of the night with the sound of train whistles echoing down the track. He stopped
abruptly. There were tears in his eyes. They both wondered if he’d been singing it to Jenny. Or for Jenny.

“People come and go, you hardly get a chance to say hello to them, no less really know them,” he said. “Woman who got killed
tonight, I don’t think I even knew her name till the super told me later on. All I knew was she irritated me playing those
damn old records of hers. Then I hear three shots and first thing I wonder is did the old lady shoot herself? She seemed very
sad,” he said, “glimpses I got of her on the stairs. Very sad. All bent and twisted and bleary-eyed, a very sad old lady.
I ran out in the hall …”

“When was this?”

“Right after I heard the shots.”

“Do you remember what time that was?”

“Around a quarter past eleven.”

“Did you see anyone in the hall?”