"I understand the colors change every so often."
"Every Christmas, yes," Miss Ungar said.
"The box I have here on my desk," Carella said, "has a blue fleur-de-lis pattern on a green field. I wonder if you-"
"Oh, my," Miss Ungar said.
"Is that a problem for you?"
"Blue and green. Oh, my, that's considerably before my time, I'm afraid."
"Are you saying the box is an old one?"
"I've been here for six years," Miss Ungar said, "and I can remember every color variation we've used-the red on pink last Christmas, for example, the black on white the Christmas before, the brown on beige the Christmas before that-"
"Uh-huh," Carella said. "But this blue on green…"
"Before my time."
"Longer ago than six years, is that it?" Carella said.
"Yes."
"Could you tell me exactly how long ago?"
"Well… is this awfully important to you?"
"It might be," Carella said. "There's no way of telling if a piece of new information is important, you see, until it suddenly becomes important."
"Um," Miss Ungar said, managing to convey in that monosyllabic grunt a sincere lack of conviction concerning the urgency of Carella's mission, and a further suspicion of his homespun philosophy about the relative importance of clues and the theory of spontaneous celebrity. "Hold on, would you please?" she said.
Carella held on. While he held on, the store piped recorded music into the telephone. Carella listened to the music and wondered why Americans felt it necessary to fill every silence with sound of one kind or another-canned rock, canned schlock, canned schmaltz, canned pap, it was impossible to step into a taxi or an elevator or even a funeral home in America without speakers blaring, oozing, or dripping sound of one kind or another. Whatever happened to silent grassy hilltops? It seemed he could remember once going to his aunt's farm in the state across the river, and sitting on a grassy hilltop where the world sloped away in utter silence at his feet. Occupied with such pastoral thoughts, a canned schlock-schmaltz arrangement of "Sunrise, Sunset" massaging his right ear, Carella almost fell asleep. Miss Ungar's vaguely mechanical voice jarred him back to his senses.
"Mr. Coppola?" she said.
"Carella," he said.
"Um," she said, this time managing to convey doubt that Carella knew his own name. "I've checked with someone who's been here longer than I," she said, "and actually the blue on green was used the Christmas before I began my employment."
"That would have made it Christmas seven years ago."
"Yes," Miss Ungar said. "If I began work here six years ago, and if the blue on green was used the Christmas before I began work, why then, yes, that would have been seven years ago."
Carella had the feeling he'd just been called an idiot. He thanked Miss Ungar for her time, and hung up. Seven years ago, he thought. He stared at the box; all theories of police work to the contrary, the new piece of information refused to become suddenly important.
***
The laboratory technicians who went over Ambrose Harding's apartment were not necessarily looking for clues that would connect his murder to those of George Chadderton and Clara Jean Hawkins. The recovered bullets-one of them found imbedded in the windowsill over the sink, the other one dug out of Harding's skull by the Assistant Medical Examiner performing the autopsy-would tell the Ballistics Section whether or not the same pistol had been used in all three killings, and that would be connection enough. They were, instead, looking for
any
clue at all, anything they could pass on to the detectives in the field, anything that might move the case off the dime and into the realm of meaningful speculation.
There was already, and even before Ballistics came through with its report on the bullets, a sense of continuity bordering on serialization; one more murder and the network would surely renew for another season. In a city like this one, a single murder was nothing to attract a crowd; you could get your single garden-variety murder any day of the week, so ho-hum, what else was new? Two murders committed with the same weapon, however, or even two murders committed in the same part of the city within a relatively short period of time, or two murder
victims
who vaguely resembled each other in age, occupation, or hair coloring were enough to cause one or another of the city's more creative journalists to speculate idly and out loud whether or not yet another demented assassin was loose on the streets while the police sat with their thumbs up their asses. But
three
murders?
Three
murders within the space of
five
days? Three murders that had in all probability been committed with the same weapon? Three murders of three blacks, one of them a denizen of, if not the underworld, then at least the soft white underbelly of the underworld, that nighttime world of whispered invitations and promises discreetly fulfilled.
There was nothing that stimulated the public's imagination more than the murder of a prostitute. It provided the morally righteous with a sense of extreme gratification, the guilty party punished if not by the hand of God, then at least by the hand of someone who understood the dangers prostitution posed in a society where men walked around with their flies*open. For many others-those men and women who had at one time or another flirted with the notion either of
using
the services of a prostitute or
providing
the services of a prostitute-the murder was proof, if any was needed, that in this city there indeed existed a large army of women ready and indeed willing to service anyone regardless of race, creed, color, gender, or persuasion. That the service in question was sometimes fraught with danger was a fact indisputably supported by the murder. The wages of sin is death, brother-but Jesus, it sounded exciting nonetheless. And for those who had in
fact
dallied hither and yon, here or there, in this or that shoddy hotel room, or in "X"-rated motels across the river where one could watch a porn flick while simultaneously performing in his own private real-life movie on a water bed, or in any of the massage parlors that lined the city's thoroughfares north, south, east, and west, for those, in short, who had stepped over the line dividing simple sex for fun and enjoyment (your place or mine, baby?) from sex for profit, sex as sin, sex as the longest-running business in the history of the race (your race or mine, baby?), for those simple folk as well, there was fascination in the murder of a prostitute because they wondered (a) whether a John like themselves had killed her, or (b) whether one of those ferocious-looking pimps with their wide-brimmed pimp hats had killed her, or (c) whether the girl who'd been killed was somebody who'd maybe given them great head just the night before-they all looked the same after a while. So yes, there were all sorts of exciting possibilities to consider when a prostitute got killed. Kill your average calypso singer, kill your average calypso singer's business manager, and nobody got too terribly excited, even if there
was
continuity to the murders. But kill a hooker? Blond wig on the sidewalk, for Christ's sake! Skirt up around her ass! A bullet in her heart and two more in her head! Now
that
was unusual and interesting. So was sand.
What the technicians found in Ambrose Harding's apartment was sand.
"Sand," Grossman told Carella on the phone.
"What do you mean, sand?"
"Sand, Steve."
"Like on a beach?"
"Yes, like on a beach."
"I'm very happy to hear that," Carella said, "especially since there
are
no beaches in Diamondback."
"There are a few beaches in Riverhead, though," Grossman said.
"Yes, and lots of beaches out on Sands Spit."
"And even
more
beaches on the Iodine Islands."
"How much sand did you guys find up there?" Carella asked.
"Not enough to make a beach."
"Enough to pave a sidewalk?"
"A minuscule amount, Steve. The vacuum picked it up. It seemed unusual enough to report, however. Sand in a Diamondback apartment? I'd say that was unusual."
"And interesting," Carella said.
"Unusual
and
interesting, yes."
"Sand," Carella said.
***
A look at the map of this city showed five distinct sections, some of which were separated by waterways and joined like Siamese twins by bridges at hip or shoulder, others with common borders that nonetheless defined political and geographical entities, one an island unto itself, entirely surrounded by water and-in the minds and hearts of its inhabitants -entirely surrounded by enemies as well. This was not a city as paranoid as Naples, which holds the undisputed record for that disease, but it was a fairly suspecting city nonetheless, a city that felt every
other
city on the face of the earth was rooting for its fiscal downfall only because it happened to be the foremost city in the world. The damn trouble with such a crazy paranoid supposition was that it happened to be true. This was not only
a
city, this was
the
city. The way Carella looked at it, if you had to ask what a city was, then you didn't live in one, or you only thought you lived in one. This city was the goddamnedest city in the world, and Carella shared with every one of its citizens-world traveler or apartment recluse-the certain knowledge that there was no place like it anywhere else. It was, quite simply, the one and onliest place to be.
Looking at a map of it, searching for sand in and around it, Carella studied the long finger of land that was not truly a part of the city but that nonetheless, and despite the fact that it belonged to the neighboring county, was righteously considered a backyard playground by anyone who lived in the city proper. Elsinore County, so named by an English colonist well versed in the works of his most illustrious countryman, consisted of some eight communities on the eastern seaboard, all of them buffered from erosion and occasional hurricane force winds by Sands Spit, which-and with all due understanding of the city's chauvinist attitude-
did
possess some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Sands Spit ran pristinely north and south, forming a natural seawall that was protection for the mainland but not for itself or for the several smaller islands clustered around it like pilot fish around a shark. These were called the Iodines.
There were six Iodine Islands in all, two of them privately owned, a third set aside as a state park open to the public, the remaining three rather larger than their sisters and developed more or less garishly with high-rise condominiums and hotels, their fearless occupants apparently willing to brave the hurricanes that infrequently-but often enough-ravaged Sands Spit, the clustering Iodines, and sometimes the city itself. The Iodines had been peculiarly named, but then again almost everything in and around this city had been peculiarly named. It was a well-known fact, for example, that there were no rivers with their heads (or even their tails) in that section of the city called Riverhead. There
was
a brook there, but it was called Five Mile Pond, and it was neither five miles long nor five miles wide, nor was it five lies from any distinctive landmark or geographical feature, but it was nonetheless a brook called Five Mile Pond in a section called Riverhead where there were no rivers. In fact-and this was rarely appreciated by those citizens of Riverhead who were constantly asking, "Hey, how come there ain't no rivers in Riverhead?"-the place had originally been called Ryerhurt's Farms after the Dutch patroon who'd owned vast acreage away back then, and eventually came to be known simply as Ryerhurt, which in 1919 was changed to Riverhead because race memory seemed vaguely to recall that Ryerhurt was a Dutchman, and during and immediately following World War I a Dutchman meant a
German
and not somebody who'd come to America from his native Rotterdam. It was a peculiar city.
The Iodine Islands had not a trace of iodine on them-no saltpeter beds or seaweed ash or oil-well salt brine-and happily so since the discovery there of that halogen might have led to pillage and rape from all sorts of companies engaged in manufacturing pharmaceuticals, dyes, or photographic supplies. As it was, the Iodines were virtually virginal. No one was quite positive how they had been named; they had certainly never been privately owned by a Dutchman named Iodine, or even an Englishman named Iodine, which was probably a more likely possibility since there
was
historical evidence, written and physical, of a British fort having once occupied a key position on the largest of the islands, facing the ocean approach to the then quite wealthy Elsinore County farmlands crouching behind Sands Spit. The smallest of the islands was once owned by a robber baron who'd taken his new bride there in the year 1904. It had since changed hands a dozen times. The other privately owned island had but a single house on it. The house was gray and weathered. Sitting starkly on the horizon, it resembled nothing so much as a prison.
***
He heard the motor launch coming back, that was one of the few sounds that penetrated the double doors, the high whining roar of the double engines, the changing sounds as she maneuvered it in to the dock. She drove that thing the way normal people drove a car or rode a bike, she was really terrific at it. That first day she took him out here, this was after they'd spent the night at the hotel, she drove him way the hell out on Sands Spit someplace, he'd only been there to go to the beach before then, terrific beach at Smithy's Cove, used to go there with his brother and with Irene, he wondered how his brother was, wondered whether he and Irene had any kids now, wondered if-