1
They thought she was colored at
first.
The
patrolman who investigated the complaint didn’t expect to find a dead woman.
This was the first time he’d seen a corpse, and he was somewhat shaken by the
ludicrously relaxed grotesqueness of the girl lying on her back on the rug, and
his hand trembled a little as he made out his report. But when he came to the
blank line calling for an identification of RACE, he unhesitatingly wrote “Negro.”
The
call had been taken at Headquarters by a patrolman in the central Complaint
Bureau. He sat at a desk with a pad of printed forms before him, and he copied
down the information, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal,
rolled the form and slipped it into a metal carrier, and then shot it by
pneumatic tube to the radio room. A dispatcher there read the complaint form,
shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, studied the precinct map on
the wall opposite his desk, and then dispatched car eleven of the 87th Precinct
to the scene.
* * * *
The girl was dead.
She may
have been a pretty girl, but she was hideous in death, distorted by the expanding
gases inside her skin case. She was wearing a sweater and skirt, and she was
barefoot, and her skirt had pulled back when she fell to the rug. Her head was
twisted at a curious angle, the short black hair cradled by the rug, her eyes
open and brown in a bloated face. The patrolman felt a sudden impulse to pull
the girl’s skirt down over her knees. He knew, suddenly, she would have wanted
this. Death had caught her in this indecent posture, robbing her of female
instinct. There were things this girl would never do again, so many things, all
of which must have seemed enormously important to the girl herself. But the
single universal thing was an infinitesimal detail, magnified now by death: she
would never again perform the simple feminine and somehow beautiful act of
pulling her skirt down over her knees.
The
patrolman sighed and finished his report. The image of the dead girl remained
in his mind all the way down to the squad car.
* * * *
It was hot in the squadroom on
that night in early August. The men working the graveyard shift had reported
for duty at 6:00 p.m., and they would not go home until eight the following
morning. They were all detectives and perhaps privileged members of the police
force, but there were many policemen — Detective Meyer Meyer among
them — who maintained that a uniformed cop’s life made a hell of a lot more
sense than a detective’s.
“Sure,
it does,” Meyer insisted now, sitting at his desk in his shirt sleeves. “A patrolman’s
schedule provides regularity and security. It gives a man a home life.”
“This
squadroom is your home, Meyer,” Carella said. “Admit it.”
“Sure,”
Meyer answered, grinning. “I can’t wait to come to work each day.” He passed a
hand over his bald pate. “You know what I like especially about this place? The
interior decoration. The decor. It’s very restful.”
“Oh,
you don’t like your fellow workers, huh?” Carella said. He slid off the desk
and winked at Cotton Hawes, who was standing at one of the filing cabinets.
Then he walked toward the water cooler at the other end of the room, just
inside the slatted railing that divided squadroom from corridor. He moved with
a nonchalant ease that was deceptive. Steve Carella had never been one of
those weight-lifting goons, and the image he presented was hardly one of
bulging muscular power. But there was a quiet strength about the man and the
way he moved, a confidence in the way he casually accepted the capabilities and
limitations of his body. He stopped at the water cooler, filled a paper cup,
and turned to look at Meyer again.
“No, I
like my colleagues,” Meyer said. “In fact, Steve, if I had my choice in all the
world of who to work with, I would choose you honorable, decent guys. Sure.”
Meyer
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