The train screeched through the heart of the city, on intimate terms with the windows of the buildings it passed. Kling sat and watched the city pass by in review outside. It was a big city, and a dirty city, but when you were born and raised in it, it became as much a part of you as your liver or your intestinal tract. He watched the city, and he watched the hands of his timepiece.
Jeannie Paige had told Claire there was a half-hour ride ahead of her. She had generally boarded a 10:30 train, and so Kling watched the advancing hands of his watch. The train swooped underground, piercing the bowels of the city. He sat and waited. Passengers came and went. Kling’s eyes did not leave his watch.
At 11:02, the train pulled into a station platform underground. The last stop had been at 10:58. It was a tossup, either way. He left the train and went up to the street.
He was in the heart of Isola.
The buildings reached up to touch the sky, tinting the night with gaudy smears of red and orange and green and yellow light. There was a men’s clothing store on the corner, and a bakery shop, and a hack stand, and a dress shop, and a bus stop up the street, and a movie marquee, and a candy store, and a Chinese restaurant, and a bar, and all the stores and signs that clustered together like close relatives of the same family all over the city.
He sighed heavily.
If Jeannie had met her boyfriend here, and if her boyfriend’s name was Clifford, combing the area would be like searching for a blade of hay in a mountain of needles.
He went to the subway kiosk again, boarding an uptown train this time. He traveled for one stop, figuring the half hour Jeannie had estimated could just as easily have brought her to this station.
The stores and signs he encountered on the street were much the same as those he had just seen. The trappings of a busy intersection. Hell, this stop was almost a dead ringer for the one he’d just visited.
Almost—but not quite.
Kling boarded the train again and headed for his furnished room.
There had been one landmark at the first stop that had been missing at the second stop. Kling’s eyes had recorded the item on his brain and buried it in his unconscious.
Unfortunately, however, it was useless there at the moment.
Science, as any fool knows, is the master sleuth.
Give the police lab a sliver of glass and they can tell you what make car the suspect was driving, when he last had it washed, what states he’d visited, and whether or not he’d ever necked in the backseat.
Provided the breaks are with them.
When the breaks are going the wrong way, science is about as master a sleuth as the corner iceman.
The breaks in the Jeannie Paige case managed to show a total disregard for the wishes and earnest endeavors of the boys in the police laboratory. There had, in all truth, been a good thumbprint on one lens of the sunglasses found near the girl’s body. Unfortunately, it is about as difficult to trace a single print as it is to unmask a Moslem woman. This did not faze the boys in the lab.
Sam Grossman was a lab technician and a police lieutenant.
He was tall and thin, a gentle man with gentle eyes and a quiet manner. He wore glasses, the only sign of science on a rock-hewn face that seemed to have been dispossessed from a New England farm. He worked at Headquarters in the clean, white lab that stretched across half the first-floor length of the building. He liked police work. He owned an orderly, precise mind, and there was something neat and truthful about the coupling of indisputable scientific fact to police theory.
He was an emotional man, but he had long ago ceased identifying the facts of sudden death with the people it summarily visited. He had seen too many bundles of bloody clothing, had studied the edges of too many powder burns, had analyzed the liquid contents of too many poisoned stomachs. Death, to Sam Grossman, was the great equalizer. It reduced human beings to arithmetical problems. If the breaks went with the lab, two and two added up to four.
If the breaks were indifferent or downright ornery, two and two sometimes equaled five, or six, or eleven.
There had been a man at the scene of Jeannie Paige’s death. The man had been equipped with a soft-pine sketch board attached to a photographic tripod. He had also carried a small alidade, a compass, graph paper, a soft-lead pencil, India rubber, common pins, a wooden triangle with scale, a scale, a tape measure, and a flexible steel ruler.
The man had worked quietly and efficiently. While photographers swarmed over the site, while technicians dusted for latent prints, while the position of the body was marked, and while the body was transported into the waiting meat wagon, while the area was carefully scrutinized for footprints or tire tracks—the man stood like an artist doing a picture of a farmer’s barn on Cape Cod.
He said hello to the detectives who occasionally stopped to chat with him. He seemed unmindful of the activity that erupted everywhere around him.
Quietly, efficiently, carefully, methodically, he sketched the scene of the crime. Then he packed up and went to his office, where, working from the preliminary sketches, he made a more detailed drawing. The drawing was printed up and, together with the detailed photos taken at the site, sent to the many departments interested in solving the mugger murder.
Sam Grossman’s interest was definitely turned in that direction, and so a copy of the drawing reached his desk. Since color, or the lack of color, played no important part in this particular homicide, the drawing was in black and white.
Grossman studied it with the dispassionate scrutiny an art dealer gives a potentially fake van Gogh.
The girl had been found at the base of a fifteen-foot drop, one of the shelflike levels that sloped down in a cliff to the riverbed. A footpath led through evergreens and maples from an emergency repairs turnoff to the highest point of the cliff, some thirty feet above the River Harb.
The repairs cutoff was plainly visible from the River Highway, which swung around in a wide arc under the Hamilton Bridge approach. The footpath, however, was screened from the highway by trees and shrubs, as were the actual sloping sides of the cliff itself.
A good set of tire tracks had been found in a thin layer of earth caked on the river side of the repairs cutoff. A pair of sunglasses had been found alongside the dead girl’s body.
That was all.
Unfortunately, the sides of the cliff sloped upward in igneous formidability. The path wound its way over solid prehistoric rock. Neither the girl nor her murderer had left any footprints for the lab boys to play with.
Unfortunately, too, though the path was screened by bushes and trees, none of the plant life encroached upon the path’s right to meander to the top of the cliff. In short, there was no fabric, leather, feathers, or telltale dust caught upon twigs or resting upon leaves.
It was a reasonable assumption that the girl had been driven to the spot of her death. There were no signs of any repairs having been made in the cutoff. If the auto had pulled in with a flat tire, the jack would have left marks on the pavement, and the tools might have left grease stains or metal scrapings. There was the possibility, of course, that the car had suffered an engine failure, in which case the hood would have been lifted and the mechanism studied. But the caked earth spread in an arc that covered the corners and sides of the cutoff. Anyone standing at the front of the car to lift the hood would surely have left footprints. There were none, nor were there any signs of prints having been brushed away.
The police assumed, therefore, that the girl and her murderer had been driving west on the River Highway, had pulled into the emergency repairs cutoff, and had then proceeded on foot to the top of the cliff.
The girl had been killed at the top of the cliff.
She had been alive up to then. There were no bloodstains along the path leading upward. With a head wound such as she had suffered, her blood would have soaked the rocks on the path if she had been killed earlier and then carried from the car.
The instrument used to split her skull and her face had been heavy and blunt. The girl had undoubtedly reached for her killer’s face, snatching off the sunglasses. She had then gone over the cliff, and the sunglasses had left her hand.
It would have been easy to assume that the lens of the glasses had shattered upon contact with the ground. This was not the case. The technicians could find not a scrap, not a sliver of glass, on the ground. The sunglasses, then, had been shattered before they went over the side of the cliff. Nor had they been shattered anywhere in the area. The lab boys searched in vain for glass. The notion of a man wearing sunglasses with one ruptured lens was a curious one, but the facts stood.
The sunglasses, of course, had drawn a blank. Five-and-dime stuff.
The tire tracks had seemed promising at first. But when the cast was studied and comparison data checked, the tires on the car proved to be as helpful as the sunglasses had been.
The tire size was 6.70-15.
The tire weight was twenty-three pounds.
The tire was made of rubber reinforced with nylon cord, the thread design featuring hook “sipes” to block skids and sideslip.
The tire retailed for $18.04, including federal tax.
The tire could be had by any man jack in the US of A who owned a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. The trade name of the tire was “Allstate.”
You could order one or a hundred and one by sending your dough and asking for catalogue number 95N03067K.
There were probably 80,000 people in the city who had four of the tires on each of their cars, not to mention a spare in the trunk.
The tire tracks told Grossman one thing: The car that had pulled into the cutoff was a light car. The tire size and weight eliminated any of the heavier cars on the road.
Grossman felt like a man who was all dressed up with no place to go.
Resignedly, he turned to the pocket patch Eileen Burke had ripped from the mugger’s jacket.
When Roger Havilland stopped by for the test results that Friday afternoon, Grossman said the patch was composed of 100 percent nylon and that it belonged to a suit, which retailed for $32 in a men’s clothing chain. The chain had sixty-four stores spread throughout the city. The suit came in only one color: blue.
Havilland gravely considered the impossibility of getting any lead from a suit sold in sixty-four stores. He scratched his head in misery.
And then he said, “Nylon? Who the hell wears nylon in the fall?”
Meyer Meyer was exuberant.
He burst into the squadroom, and he waltzed over to where Temple was fishing in the file, and he slapped his partner on the back.
“They cracked it!” he shouted.
“What?” Temple said. “Meyer, you damn near cracked my back. What the hell are you talking about?”
“The cats,” Meyer said, shrewdly studying Temple.
“What cats?”
“The 33rd Precinct. This guy who was going around kidnapping cats. I tell you this is the eeriest case they’ve ever cracked. I was talking to Agnucci. Do you know him? He’s third grade down there, been working on this one all along, handled most of the squeals. Well, man, they’ve cracked it.” Meyer studied Temple patiently.
“So what’d it turn out to be?” Temple asked, his interest piqued.
“They got their first lead the other night,” Meyer said. “They got a squeal from some woman who said an Angora had been swiped. Well, they came upon this guy in an alleyway, and guess what he was doing?”
“What?” Temple asked.
“Burning the cat!”
“Burning the cat? You mean, setting fire to the cat?”
“Yep,” Meyer said, nodding. “He stopped when they showed, and he ran like hell. They saved the cat, and they also got a good description of the suspect. After that, it was duck soup.”
“When’d they get him?” Temple asked.
“This afternoon. They broke into his apartment, and it was the damnedest thing ever, I’m telling you. This guy was actually burning up the cats, burning them to this powdery ash.”
“I don’t believe it,” Temple said.
“So help me. He’d kidnap the cats and burn them into ashes. He had shelves and shelves of these little jars, full of cat ashes.”
“But what in hell for?” Temple asked. “Was the guy nuts?”
“Nossir,” Meyer said. “But you can bet the boys at the 33rd were asking the same question.”
“Well, what was it?”
“They asked him, George. They asked him just that. Agnucci took him aside and said, ‘Listen, Mac, are you nuts or something? What’s the idea burnin’ up all them cats and then puttin’ the ashes in jars like that?’ Agnucci asked, all right.”
“Well, what’d the guy say?”
Meyer patiently said, “Just what you’d expect him to say. He explained that he wasn’t crazy and that there was a good reason for those cat ashes in all those jars. He explained that he was making something.”
“What?” Temple asked anxiously. “What in hell was he making?”
“Instant p-ssy,” Meyer said softly, and then he began chuckling.
The report on the package of Pall Mall cigarettes and the match folder came in later that afternoon. It simply stated that each article, as such articles are wont to be, had been fingered a good many times. The only thing the fingerprint boys got from either of them was an overlay of smeared, worthless latents.
The match folder, with its blatant advertisement for the Three Aces, was turned over to the Detective Bureau, and the detectives of Homicide North and the 87th Precinct sighed heavily because the match folder meant more goddamned legwork.
Kling dressed for his date carefully.
He didn’t know exactly why, but he felt that extreme care should be exercised in the handling and feeding of Claire Townsend. He admitted to himself that he had never (well, hardly ever) been so taken with a girl and that he would probably be devastated forever (well, for a long time) if he lost her. He had no ideas on exactly how to win her, except for this intuition that urged him to proceed with caution. She had, after all, warned him repeatedly. She had put out the KEEP OFF! sign, and then she had read the sign aloud to him, and then she had translated it into six languages, but she had, nonetheless, accepted his offer.
Which proves beyond doubt, he thought, that the girl is wildly in love with me.
Which piece of deduction was about on a par with the high level of detective work he had done so far. His abortive attempts at getting anywhere with the Jeannie Paige murder left him feeling a little foolish. He wanted very much to be promoted to detective 3rd/grade someday, but he entertained severe doubts now as to whether he really was detective material. It was almost two weeks since Peter Bell had come to him with his plea. It was almost two weeks since Bell had scribbled his address on a scrap of paper, a scrap still tucked in one of the pockets of Kling’s wallet. A lot had happened in those nearly two weeks. And those happenings gave Kling reason for a little healthy soul-searching.
He was, at this point, just about ready to leave the case to the men who knew how to handle such things. His amateurish legwork, his fumbling questions, had netted a big zero—or so he thought. The only important thing he’d turned up was Claire Townsend. Claire, he was certain, was important. She was important now, and he felt she would become more important as time went by.
So let’s polish our goddamn shoes. You want to look like a slob?
He took his shoes from the closet, slipped them on over socks he would most certainly smear with polish and later change, and set to work with his shine kit.
He was spitting on his right shoe when the knock sounded on the door.
“Who is it?” he called.
“Police. Open up,” the voice said.
“Who?”
“Police.”
Kling rose, his trouser cuffs rolled up high, his hands smeared with black polish. “Is this a gag?” he said to the closed door.
“Come on, Kling,” the voice said. “You know better than that.”
Kling opened the door. Two men stood in the hallway. Both were huge; both wore tweed jackets over V-necked sweaters; both looked bored.
“Bert Kling?” one of them asked.
“Yes?” he said puzzled.
A shield flashed. “Monoghan and Monroe,” one of them said. “Homicide. I’m Monoghan.”
“I’m Monroe,” the other one said.
They were like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Kling thought. He suppressed his smile. Neither of his visitors was smiling. Each looked as if he had just come from an out-of-town funeral.
“Come in, fellers,” Kling said, “I was just dressing.”
“Thank you,” Monoghan said.
“Thank you,” Monroe echoed.
They stepped into the room. They both took off their fedoras. Monoghan cleared his throat. Kling looked at them expectantly.
“Like a drink?” he asked, wondering why they were there, feeling somehow awed and frightened by their presence.
“A short one,” Monoghan said.
“A tiny hooker,” Monroe said.
Kling went to the closet and pulled out a bottle. “Bourbon okay?”
“When I was a patrolman,” Monoghan said, “I couldn’t afford bourbon.”
“This was a gift,” Kling said.
“I never took whiskey. Anybody on the beat wanted to see me, it was cash on the line.”
“That’s the only way,” Monroe said.
“This was a gift from my father. When I was in the hospital. The nurses wouldn’t let me touch it there.”
“You can’t blame them,” Monoghan said.
“Turn the place into an alcoholic ward,” Monroe said, unsmiling.
Kling brought them their drinks. Monoghan hesitated.
“Ain’t you drinking with us?”
“I’ve got an important date,” he said. “I want to keep my head.”
Monoghan looked at him with the flat look of a reptile. He shrugged, then turned to Monroe and said, “Here’s looking at you.”
Monroe acknowledged the toast. “Up yours,” he said unsmilingly and then tossed off the shot.
“Good bourbon,” Monoghan said.
“Excellent,” Monroe amplified.
“More?” Kling asked.
“Thanks,” Monoghan said.
“No,” Monroe said.
Kling looked at them. “You said you were from Homicide?”
“Homicide North.”
“Monoghan and Monroe,” Monroe said. “Ain’t you heard of us? We cracked the Nelson-Nichols-Permen triangle murder.”
“Oh,” Kling said.
“Sure,” Monoghan said modestly. “Big case.”
“One of our biggest,” Monroe said.
“Big one.”
“Yeah.”
“What are you working on now?” Kling asked, smiling.
“The Jeannie Paige murder,” Monoghan said flatly.
A dart of fear shot up into Kling’s throat. “Oh?” he said.
“Yeah,” Monoghan said.
“Yeah,” Monroe said.
Monoghan cleared his throat. “How long you been with the force, Kling?” he asked.
“Just…just a short while.”
“That figures,” Monoghan said.
“Sure,” Monroe said.
“You like your job?”
“Yes,” Kling answered hesitantly.
“You want to keep it?”
“You want to go on being a cop?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then keep out of Homicide.”
“What?” Kling said.
“He means,” Monroe explained, “keep out of Homicide.”
“I…I don’t know what you mean.”
“We mean, keep away from stiffs. Stiffs are our business.”
“We like stiffs,” Monroe said.
“We’re specialists, you understand? You call in a heart doctor when you got heart disease, don’t you? You call in an eye, ear, nose, and throat man when you got laryngitis, don’t you? Okay, when you got a stiff, you call in Homicide. That’s us. Monoghan and Monroe.”
“You don’t call in a patrolman.”
“Homicide. Not a beat-walker.”
“Not a pavement-pounder.”
“Not a nightstick twirler.”
“Not a traffic jockey.”
“Not you!” Monoghan said.
“Clear?” Monroe asked.
“Yes,” Kling said.
“It’s gonna get a lot clearer,” Monoghan added. “The lieutenant wants to see you.”
“What for?”
“The lieutenant is a funny guy. He thinks Homicide is the best damn department in the city. He runs Homicide, and he don’t like police coming in where they ain’t asked. I’ll let you in on a secret. He don’t even like the detectives from your precinct to go messing around in murder. Trouble is, he can’t refuse their assistance or their cooperation, ‘specially when your precinct manages to stack up so many goddamn homicides each year. So he suffers the dicks—but he don’t have to suffer no goddamn patrolman.”
“But…but why does he want to see me? I understand now. I shouldn’t have stuck my nose in, and I’m sorry I—”
“You shouldn’t have stuck your nose in,” Monoghan agreed.
“You definitely shouldn’t have.”
“But I didn’t do any harm. I just—”
“Who knows what harm you done?” Monoghan said.
“You may have done untold harm,” Monroe said.
“Ah, hell,” Kling said. “I’ve got a date.”
“Yeah,” Monoghan said. “With the lieutenant.”
“Call your broad,” Monroe advised. “Tell her the police are bugging you.”
Kling looked at his watch. “I can’t reach her,” he said. “She’s at school.”
“Impairing the morals of a minor,” Monoghan said, smiling.
“Better you shouldn’t mention that to the lieutenant.”
“She’s in college,” Kling said. “Listen, will I be through by seven?”
“Maybe,” Monoghan said.
“Get your coat,” Monroe said.
“He don’t need a coat. It’s nice and mild.”
“It may get chilly later. This is pneumonia weather.”
Kling sighed heavily. “All right if I wash my hands?”
“What?” Monoghan asked.
“He’s polite,” Monroe said.
“No, I have to wash my hands.”
“Okay, so wash them. Hurry up. The lieutenant don’t like to be kept waiting.”
The building that housed Homicide North was the shabbiest, dowdiest, dirtiest, crummiest building Kling had ever seen. It was a choice spot for Homicide, Kling thought instantly. It even stinks of death. He had followed Monoghan and Monroe past the desk sergeant and then through a narrow, dimly lighted hallway lined with benches. He could hear typewriters clacking behind closed doors. An occasional open door revealed a man in shirtsleeves and shoulder holster. The entire place gave the impression of being the busy office of a numbers banker. Phones rang, people carried files from one office to another, men stopped at the water cooler—all in a dimly illuminated Dante interior.
“Sit down,” Monoghan had said.
“Cool your heels a little,” Monroe added.
“The lieutenant is dictating a memo. He’ll be with you in a little while.”
Whatever the good lieutenant was dictating, Kling decided after waiting an hour, it was not a memo. It was probably volume two of his autobiography, The Patrolman Years. He had long ago given up the possibility of being on time for his date with Claire. It was now 6:45, and tempus was fugiting along at a merry clip. With luck, though, he might still catch her at the school, assuming she’d give him the benefit of the doubt and wait around a while. Which, considering her reluctance to make the date in the first place, was a hell of a lot to assume.
Impatiently, Kling bided his time.
At 8:20, he stopped a man in the corridor and asked if he could use a phone. The man studied him sourly and said, “Better wait until after the lieutenant sees you. He’s dictating a memo.”
“On what?” Kling cracked. “How to dismantle a radio motor patrol car?”
“What?” the man said. “Oh, I get it. Pretty funny.” He left Kling and went to the water cooler. “You want some water?”
“I haven’t eaten since noon,” Kling said.
“Take a little water. Settle your stomach.”
“No bread to go with it?” Kling asked.
“What?” the man said. “Oh, I get it. Pretty funny.”
“How much longer do you think he’ll be?”
“Depends. He dictates slow.”
“How long has he been with Homicide North?”
“Five, ten years. I don’t know.”
“Where’d he work before this? Dachau?”
“What?” the man said. “Oh, I get it.”
“Pretty funny,” Kling said dryly. “Where are Monoghan and Monroe?”
“They went home. They’re hard workers, those two. Put in a big day.”
“Listen,” Kling said, “I’m hungry. Can’t you kind of goose him a little?”
“The lieutenant?” the man said. “Me goose the lieutenant? That’s the funniest thing you said yet.” He shook his head and walked off down the corridor, turning once to look back at Kling incredulously.
At 10:33, a detective with a .38 tucked into his waistband came into the corridor.
“Bert Kling?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kling said wearily.
“Lieutenant Hawthorne will see you now,” he said.
“Glory hall—”
“Don’t make wisecracks with the lieutenant,” the detective advised. “He ain’t eaten since suppertime.”
He led Kling to a frosted door appropriately marked LIEUTENANT HENRY HAWTHORNE, threw it open, said, “Kling, Lieutenant,” and then ushered Kling into the room. The detective left, closing the door behind him.
Hawthorne sat behind a desk at the far end of the room. He was a small man with a bald head and bright blue eyes. The sleeves on his white shirt were rolled up past the elbows. The collar was unbuttoned, the tie knot yanked down. He wore a shoulder holster from which protruded the walnut stock of a .45 automatic. His desk was clean and bare. Green file cabinets formed a fortress wall behind the desk and on the side of it. The blinds on the window to the left of the desk were pulled tightly closed. A wooden plaque on the desk read: LT. HAWTHORNE.
“Kling?” he said. His voice was high and brassy, like a double C forced from the bell of a broken trumpet.
“Yes, sir,” Kling said.
“Sit down,” Hawthorne said, indicating the straight-backed chair alongside the desk.
“Thank you, sir,” Kling said. He walked to the chair and sat. He was nervous, very nervous. He certainly didn’t want to lose his job, and Hawthorne seemed like a tough customer. He wondered if a lieutenant in Homicide could ask the commissioner to fire a patrolman, and he decided a lieutenant in Homicide definitely could. He swallowed. He wasn’t thinking of Claire any longer, nor was he thinking of food.
“So you’re Mr. Sherlock Holmes, eh?” Hawthorne said.
Kling didn’t know what to answer. He didn’t know whether to smile or cast his eyes downward. He didn’t know whether to sit or go blind.
Hawthorne watched him. Emphatically, he repeated, “So you’re Mr. Sherlock Holmes, eh?”
“Sir?” Kling said politely.
“Diddling around with a murder case, eh?”
“I didn’t realize, sir, that—”
“Listen to me, Sherlock,” Hawthorne said, slamming his open palm on to the desk. “We got a phone call here this afternoon.” He opened the top drawer. “Clocked in at”—he consulted a pad— “sixteen thirty-seven. Said you were messing around with this Jeannie Paige thing.” Hawthorne crashed the desk drawer shut. “I’ve been very kind to you, Sherlock. I could have gone straight to Captain Frick at the 87th. The 87th happens to be your precinct, and Captain Frick happens to be an old and dear friend of mine, and Captain Frick doesn’t take nonsense from runny-nosed patrolmen who happen to be walking beats. Lieutenant Byrnes of your precinct likes to stick his nose in murder cases, too, and I can’t do a hell of a lot about that, except occasionally show him I don’t too much appreciate his goddamn Aunt Suzianna help! But if the 87th think it’s going to run in a patrolman on me, if the 87th thinks—”
“Sir, the precinct didn’t know anything about my—”
“AND THEY STILL DON’T KNOW!” Hawthorne shouted. “And they don’t know because I was kind enough not to mention this to Captain Frick. I’m being good to you, Sherlock, remember that. I’m being goddamn good and kind to you, so don’t give me any lip!”
“Sir, I wasn’t—”
“All right, listen to me, Sherlock. If I hear again that you’re even thinking about Jeannie Paige, your tail is going to be in one big sling. I’m not talking about a transfer to a beat in Bethtown, either. I’m talking about OUT! You are going to be out in the street. You are going to be out and cold. And don’t think I can’t do it.”
“Sir, I didn’t think—”
“I know the commissioner the way I know the back of my own hand. The commissioner would sell his wife if I asked him to; that’s the way I know the commissioner. So don’t for one second think the commissioner wouldn’t toss a snot-nosed patrolman right out on his ear if I asked him to. Don’t for a minute think that, Sherlock.”
“Sir—”
“And don’t for a minute think I’m kidding, Sherlock, because I never kid around where it concerns murder. You’re fooling with murder, do you realize that? You’ve been barging around asking questions, and God alone knows who you’ve scared into hiding, and God alone knows how much of our careful work you’ve fouled up! SO LAY OFF! Go walk your goddamn beat! If I get another squeal about you—”
“Sir?”
“WHAT IS IT?”
“Who called you, sir?”
“That’s none of your goddamn business!” Hawthorne shouted.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get out of my office. You make me sick. Get out of my office.”
“Yes, sir,” Kling said. He turned and went to the door.
“AND DON’T FOOL WITH MURDER!” Hawthorne shouted after him.