Nocturne (3 page)

Wrong, Carella thought. Murder has become a tradition here.

“She was a big star over there,” Karen said. “Well, here, too, in fact.”

Bad verbal tic, Hawes thought.

“She used to tell me stories of how she played for royalty all over the world, in fact. She had a lot of memories.”

“When did she tell you these stories?”

“Oh, in the afternoons. We had tea together every now and then.”

“In her apartment?”

“Yes. It was another tradition. Tea time. She had a lovely tea set. I had to pour because of her hands. We used to sit and
listen to records she’d made when she was famous. And sip tea in the late afternoon. It reminded me of T. S. Eliot somehow.”

Me, too, Hawes thought, but again did not say.

“So when you said you knew her just to talk to,” Carella said, “you were including these visits to her apartment …”

“Oh, yes.”

“… when you listened to music together.”

“Yes. Well, my apartment, too. Some nights, I invited her in. We had little dinner parties together. She was alone and lonely
and … well, I didn’t want her to start drinking too early. She tended to drink more heavily at night.”

“By heavily …?”

“Well … she started drinking as soon as she woke up in the morning, in fact. But at night … well … she sometimes drank herself
into a stupor.”

“How do you know that?” Hawes asked.

“She told me. She was very frank with me. She knew she had a problem.”

“Was she doing anything about it?”

“She was eighty-three years old. What could she do about it? The arthritis was bad enough. But she wore a hearing aid, you
know. And lately, she began hearing ringing in her head, and hissing, like a kettle, you know? And sometimes a roaring sound,
like heavy machinery? It was really awful. She told me her ear doctor wanted to send her to a neurologist for testing, but
she was afraid to go.”

“When was this?” Hawes asked.

“Before Thanksgiving. It was really so sad.”

“These afternoon teas,” Carella said, “these little dinner parties … was anyone else at them? Besides you and Miss Dyalovich?”

Somehow he liked that better than Mrs. Helder. Cover of
Time
magazine, he was thinking. You shouldn’t end up as Mrs. Helder.

“No, just the two of us. In fact, I don’t think she had any other friends. She told me once that all the people she’d known
when she was young and famous were dead now. All she had was me, I guess. And the cat. She was very close to poor Irina. What’s
going to happen to her now? Will she go to an animal shelter?”

“Miss, he killed the cat, too,” Hawes said.

“Oh dear. Oh dear,” Karen said, and was silent for a moment. “She used to go out early every morning to buy fresh fish for
her, can you imagine? No matter how cold it was, arthritic old lady. Irina
loved
fish.”

Her brown eyes suddenly welled with tears. Hawes wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. Instead, he said, “Did she
have any living relatives?”

People to inform, Carella thought. He almost sighed.

“A married daughter in London.”

“Do you know her name?”

“No.”

“Anyone here in this country?”

“I think a granddaughter someplace in the city.”

“Ever meet her?”

“No.”

“Would you know
her
name?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Did Miss Dyalovich ever mention any threatening phone calls or letters?”

“No.”

Run her through the drill, Carella was thinking.

“Had she ever seen anyone lurking around the building …?”

“No.”

“Following her …?”

“No.”

“Do you know of any enemies she may have had?”

“No.”

“Anyone with whom she may have had a continuing dispute?”

“No.”

“Anyone she may have quarreled with?”

“No …”

“Even anyone on unfriendly terms with her?”

“No.”

“Did she owe anyone money?”

“I doubt it.”

“Did anyone owe
her
money?”

“She was an old woman living on welfare. What money did she have to lend?”

Toast of six continents, Hawes thought. Ends up living on welfare in a shithole on Lincoln. Sipping tea and whiskey in the
late afternoon. Listening to her own old 78s. Her hands all gnarled.

“This granddaughter,” he said. “Did you ever see her?”

“No, I never met her. I told you.”

“What I’m asking is did you ever
see
her? Coming out of the apartment next door. Or in the hall. Did she ever come here to
visit
, is what I’m asking?”

“Oh. No. I don’t think they got along.”

“Then there
was
someone on unfriendly terms with her,” Carella said.

“Yes, but family,” Karen said, shrugging it off.

“Was it Miss Dyalovich who told you they didn’t get along?”

“Yes.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, two or three months ago.”

“Came up out of the blue, did it?”

“No, she was lamenting the fact that her only daughter lived so far away, in London …”

“How’d that lead to the granddaughter?”

“Well, she said if only she and Priscilla could get along …”

“Is
that
her name?” Hawes asked at once. “The granddaughter?”

“Oh. Yes. I’m sorry, I didn’t remember it until it popped out of my mouth.”

“Priscilla what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’ll come to you.”

“No, I don’t think I
ever
knew it.”

“The obit will tell us,” Carella said. “Later this morning.”

It was now exactly one
a.m
.

The man who owned the liquor store told them Saturdays were his biggest nights. Made more in the hour before closing on Saturday
nights than he did the rest of the entire year. Only thing bigger was New Year’s Eve, he told them. Even bigger than that
was when New Year’s Eve fell on a Saturday night. Couldn’t beat it.

“
Biggest
night of the year,” he said. “I could stay open all night New Year’s Eve and sell everything in the store.”

This was already Sunday, but it still felt like Saturday night to the guy who owned the store. It must have still felt like
Christmas, too, even though it was already the twenty-first of January. A little Christmas tree blinked green and red in the
front window. Little cardboard cutouts, hanging across the ceiling, endlessly repeated
happy holidays
. Gift-packaged bottles of booze sat on countertops and tables.

The store owner’s name was Martin Keely. He was maybe sixty-eight, sixty-nine, in there, a short stout man with a drunkard’s
nose and wide suspenders to match it. He kept interrupting their conversation, such as it was, to make yet another sale. This
hour of the night, he was selling mostly cheap wine to panhandlers who straggled in with their day’s take. This became a different
city after midnight. You saw different people in the streets and on the sidewalks. In the bars and clubs that were open. In
the subways and the taxicabs. An entirely different city with entirely different people in it.

One of them had killed Svetlana Dyalovich.

“What time did she come in here, would you remember?” Hawes asked.

“Around eleven o’clock.”

Which more or less tied in. Man down the hall said he heard the shots at about eleven-twenty. Super called 911 five minutes
after that.

“What’d she buy?”

“Bottle of Four Roses.”

Exactly the brand that had dropped to the floor when someone shot her.

“How much did it cost?”

“Eight dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

“How’d she pay for it?”

“Cash.”

“Exact?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did she hand you
exactly
eight dollars and ninety-nine cents.”

“No, she handed me a ten-dollar bill. I gave her change.”

“Where’d she put the change?”

“In this little purse she was carrying. Took a ten out of the purse, handed it to me. Gave her one dollar and one cent in
change. Put that in the purse.”

“The dollar was in change, too?”

“No, the dollar was a bill.”

“And you say she put the change in her handbag?”

“No, she put it in this
purse
. A little purse. A change purse. With the little snaps on top you click open with your thumb and forefinger. A purse, you
know?” he said, seeming to become inappropriately agitated. “You know what a purse is? A purse ain’t a handbag. A purse is
a purse. Doesn’t anybody in this city speak English anymore?”

“Where’d she put this purse?” Carella asked calmly.

“In her coat pocket.”

“The pocket of the mink,” he said, nodding.

“No, she wasn’t wearing a mink. She was wearing a cloth coat.”

The detectives looked at him.

“Are you sure about that?” Hawes asked.

“Positive. Ratty blue cloth coat. Scarf on her head. Silk, I think. Whatever. Pretty. But it had seen better days.”

“Cloth coat and a silk scarf,” Carella said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re saying that when she came in here at eleven o’clock last night …”

“No, I’m not saying that at all.”

“You’re
not
saying she was wearing a cloth coat and a silk scarf?”

“I’m not saying she came in at eleven last night.”

“If it wasn’t eleven, what time
was
it?”

“Oh, it was eleven, all right. But it was eleven yesterday morning.”

They found the change purse in the pocket of a blue cloth coat hanging in the bedroom closet.

There was a dollar and a penny in it.

I
n the year 1909, there used to be forty-four morning newspapers in this city. By 1929, that figure had dropped to thirty.
Three years later, due to technological advances, competition for circulation, standardization of the product, managerial
faults, and, by the way, the Great Depression, this number was reduced to a mere three. Now there were but two.

Since there was a killer out there, the detectives didn’t want to wait till four, five
a.m
., when both papers would hit the newsstands. Nor did they think a call to the morning tabloid would be fruitful, mainly because
they didn’t think it would run an obit on a concert pianist, however famous she once may have been. It later turned out they
were wrong; the tabloid played the story up big, but only because Svetlana had been living in obscurity and poverty after
three decades of celebrity, and her granddaughter—but that was another story.

Hawes spoke on the phone to the obituary editor at the so-called quality paper, a most cooperative man who was ready to read
the full obit to him until Hawes assured him that all he wanted were the names of Miss Dyalovich’s surviving kin. The editor
skipped to the last paragraph, which noted that Svetlana was survived by a daughter, Maria Stetson, who lived in London, and
a granddaughter, Priscilla Stetson, who lived right here in the big bad city.

“You know who she is, don’t you?” the editor asked.

Hawes thought he meant Svetlana.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

“We couldn’t mention it in the obit because that’s supposed to be exclusively about the deceased.”

“I’m not following you,” Hawes said.

“The granddaughter. She’s Priscilla Stetson. The singer.”

“Oh? What kind of singing does she do?”

“Supper club. Piano bar. Cabaret. Like that.”

“You wouldn’t know
where
, would you?” Hawes asked.

In this city, many of the homeless sleep by day and roam by night. Nighttime is dangerous for them; there are predators out
there and a cardboard box offers scant protection against someone intent on robbery or rape. So they wander the streets like
shapeless wraiths, adding a stygian dimension to the nocturnal landscape.

The streetlamps are on. Traffic lights blink their intermittent reds, yellows and greens into the empty hours of the night,
but the city seems dark. Here and there, a bathroom light snaps on. In the otherwise blank face of an apartment building,
a lamp burns steadily in the bedroom of an insomniac. The commercial buildings are all ablaze with illumination, but the only
people in them are the office cleaners, readying the spaces for the workday that will begin at nine Monday morning. Tonight—it
still feels like night even though the morning is already an hour and a half old—the cables on the bridges that span the city’s
river are festooned with bright lights that reflect in the black waters below. Yet all seems so dark, perhaps because it is
so empty.

At one-thirty in the morning the theater crowd has been home and in bed for a long time, and many of the hotel bars have been
closed for a half hour already. The clubs and discos will be open till four
a.m
., the outside legal limit for serving alcoholic beverages, at which time the delis and diners will begin serving breakfast.
The underground clubs will grind on till six in the morning. But for now and for the most part, the city is as still as any
tomb.

Steam hisses up from sewer lids.