“Uhm,” she said, and then she rolled over into the pillow. He sneaked a last look at her from the doorway and then went through the living room and out of the house. He glanced at his watch. It was 11:30. Right on schedule, and damn if it wasn’t a lot cooler in the street.

  At 11:41, when Mike Reardon was three blocks away from his place of business, two bullets entered the back of his skull and ripped away half his face when they left his body. He felt only impact and sudden unbearable pain, and then vaguely heard the shots, and then everything inside him went dark, and he crumpled to the pavement.

  He was dead before he struck the ground.

  He had been a citizen of the city, and now his blood poured from his broken face and spread around him in a sticky red smear.

  Another citizen found him at 11:56 and went to call the police. There was very little difference between the citizen who rushed down the street to a phone booth and the citizen named Mike Reardon who lay crumpled and lifeless against the concrete.

  Except one.

  Mike Reardon was a cop.

  The two Homicide cops looked down at the body on the sidewalk. It was a hot night, and the flies swarmed around the sticky blood on the pavement. The assistant medical examiner was kneeling alongside the body, gravely studying it. A photographer from the Bureau of Identification was busily popping flash bulbs. Cars 23 and 24 were parked across the street, and the patrolmen from those cars were unhappily engaged in keeping back spectators.

  The call had gone to one of the two switchboards at Headquarters where a sleepy patrolman had listlessly taken down the information and then shot it via pneumatic tube to the Radio Room. The dispatcher in the Radio Room, after consulting the huge precinct map on the wall behind him, had sent Car 23 to investigate and report on the allegedly bleeding man in the street. When Car 23 had reported back with a homicide, the dispatcher had contacted Car 24 and sent it to the scene. At the same time, the patrolman on the switchboard had called Homicide North and also the 87th Precinct, in which territory the body had been found.

  The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded‐up theater. The theater had started as a first‐run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second‐run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign‐language films. There was a door to the left of the movie house, and the door had once been boarded, too, but the planks had been ripped loose and the staircase inside was littered with cigarette butts, empty pint whiskey bottles, and contraceptives. The marquee above the theater stretched to the sidewalk, punched with jagged holes, the victim of thrown rocks, tin cans, hunks of pipe, and general debris.

  Across the street from the theater was an empty lot. The lot had once owned an apartment house, and the house had been a good one with high rents. It had not been unusual, in the old days, to see an occasional mink coat drifting from the marbled doorway of that apartment house. But the crawling tendrils of the slum had reached out for the brick, clutching it with tenacious fingers, pulling it into the ever‐widening circle it called its own. The old building had succumbed, becoming a part of the slum, so that people rarely remembered it had once been a proud and elegant dwelling. And then it had been condemned, and the building had been razed to the ground, and now the lot was clear and open, except for the scattered brick rubble that still clung to the ground in some places. A city housing project, it was rumored, was going up in the lot. In the meantime, the kids used the lot for various purposes. Most of the purposes were concerned with bodily functions, and so a stench hung in the air over the lot, and the stench was particularly strong on a hot summer night, and it drifted over toward the theater, captured beneath the canopy of the overhanging marquee, smothering the sidewalk with its smell of life, mingling with the smell of death on the pavement.

  One of the Homicide cops moved away from the body and began scouring the sidewalk. The second cop stood with his hands in his back pockets. The assistant ME went through the ritual of ascertaining the death of a man who was certainly dead. The first cop came back.

  “You see these?” he asked.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Couple of ejected cartridge cases.”

  “Mm?”

  “Remington slugs. .45 caliber.”

  “Put ’em in an envelope and tag ’em. You about finished, Doc?”

  “In a minute.”

  The flashbulbs kept popping. The photographer worked like the press agent for a hit musical. He circled the star of the show, and he snapped his pictures from different angles, and all the while his face showed no expression, and the sweat streamed down his back, sticking his shirt to his flesh. The assistant ME ran his hand across his forehead.

  “What the hell’s keeping the boys from the 87th?” the first cop asked.

  “Big poker game going, probably. We’re better off without them.” He turned to the assistant ME. “What do you say, Doc?”

  “I’m through.” He rose wearily.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Just what it looks like. He was shot twice in the back of the head. Death was probably instantaneous.”

  “Want to give us a time?”

  “On a gunshot wound? Don’t kid me.”

  “I thought you guys worked miracles.”

  “We do. But not during the summer.”

  “Can’t you even guess?”

  “Sure, guessing’s free. No rigor mortis yet, so I’d say he was killed maybe a half hour ago. With this heat, though…Hell, he might maintain normal body warmth for hours. You won’t get us to go out on a limb with this one. Not even after the autopsy is—”

  “All right, all right. Mind if we find out who he is?”

  “Just don’t mess it up for the lab boys. I’m taking off.” The assistant ME glanced at his watch. “For the benefit of the timekeeper, it’s twelve nineteen.”

  “Short day today,” the first Homicide cop said. He jotted the time down on the timetable he’d kept since his arrival at the scene.

  The second cop was kneeling near the body. He looked up suddenly. “He’s heeled,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  The assistant ME walked away, mopping his brow.

  “Looks like a .38,” the second cop said. He examined the holstered gun more closely. “Yeah. Detective’s Special. Want to tag this?”

  “Sure.” The first cop heard a car brake to a stop across the street. The front doors opened, and two men stepped out and headed for the knot around the body. “Here’s the 87th now.”

  “Just in time for tea,” the second cop said drily. “Who’d they send?”

  “Looks like Carella and Bush.” The first cop took a packet of rubber‐banded tags from his right‐hand jacket pocket. He slipped one of the tags free from the rubber band and then returned the rest to his pocket. The tag was a three‐by‐five rectangle of an oatmeal color. A hole was punched in one end of the tag, and a thin wire was threaded through the hole and twisted to form two loose ends. The tag read, POLICE DEPARTMENT, and beneath that in bolder type, EVIDENCE.

  Carella and Bush, from the 87th Precinct, walked over leisurely. The Homicide cop glanced at them cursorily, turned to the Where found space on the tag, and began filling it out. Carella wore a blue suit, his gray tie neatly clasped to his white shirt. Bush was wearing an orange sports shirt and khaki trousers.

  “If it ain’t Speedy Gonzales and Whirlaway,” the second Homicide cop said. “You guys certainly move fast, all right. What do you do on a bomb scare?”

  “We leave it to the Bomb Squad,” Carella said drily. “What do you do?”

  “You’re very comical,” the Homicide cop said.

  “We got hung up.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I was catching alone when the squeal came in,” Carella said. “Bush was out with Foster on a bar knifing. Reardon didn’t show.” Carella paused. “Ain’t that right, Bush?” Bush nodded.

  “If you’re catching, what the hell are you doing here?” the first Homicide cop said.

  Carella grinned. He was a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave an impression of great power, but the power was not a meaty one. It was, instead, a fine‐honed muscular power. He wore his brown hair short. His eyes were brown, with a peculiar downward slant that gave him a clean‐shaved Oriental appearance. He had wide shoulders and narrow hips, and he managed to look well dressed and elegant even when he was dressed in a leather jacket for a waterfront plant. He had thick wrists and big hands, and he spread the hands wide now and said, “Me answer the phone when there’s a homicide in progress?” His grin widened. “I left Foster to catch. Hell, he’s practically a rookie.”

  “How’s the graft these days?” the second Homicide cop asked.

  “Up yours,” Carella answered drily.

  “Some guys get all the luck. You sure as hell don’t get anything from a stiff.”

  “Except tsores,” the first cop said.

  “Talk English,” Bush said genially. He was a soft‐spoken man, and his quiet voice came as a surprise because he was all of six feet four inches and weighed at least 220, bone dry. His hair was wild and unkempt, as if a wise Providence had fashioned his unruly thatch after his surname. His hair was also red, and it clashed violently against the orange sports shirt he wore. His arms hung from the sleeves of the shirt, muscular and thick. A jagged knife scar ran the length of his right arm.

  The photographer walked over to where the detectives were chatting.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked angrily.

  “We’re trying to find out who he is,” the second cop said. “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “I didn’t say I was finished with him yet.”

  “Well, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah, but you should’ve asked.”

  “For Christ’s sake, who are you working for? Conover?”

  “You Homicide dicks give me a pain in the—”

  “Go home and emulsify some negatives or something, will you?”

  The photographer glanced at his watch. He grunted and withheld the time purposely so that the first cop had to glance at his own watch before jotting down the time on his timetable. He subtracted a few minutes and indicated a TOA for Carella and Bush, too.

  Carella looked down at the back of the dead man’s head. His face remained expressionless, except for a faint, passing film of pain which covered his eyes for a moment and then darted away as fleetingly as a jackrabbit.

  “What’d they use?” he asked. “A cannon?”

  “A .45,” the first cop said. “We’ve got the cartridge cases.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Figures,” Carella said. “Why don’t we flip him over?”

  “Ambulance coming?” Bush asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” the first cop said. “Everybody’s late tonight.”

  “Everybody’s drowning in sweat tonight,” Bush said. “I can use a beer.”

  “Come on,” Carella said, “give me a hand here.”

  The second cop bent down to help Carella. Together, they rolled the body over. The flies swarmed up angrily and then descended to the sidewalk again, and to the bloody, broken flesh that had once been a face. In the darkness, Carella saw a gaping hole where the left eye should have been. There was another hole beneath the right eye, and the cheek bone was splintered outward, the jagged shards piercing the skin.

  “Poor bastard,” Carella said. He would never get used to staring death in the face. He had been a cop for twelve years now, and he had learned to stomach the sheer, overwhelming, physical impact of death—but he would never get used to the other thing about death, the invasion of privacy that came with death, the reduction of pulsating life to a pile of bloody, fleshy rubbish.

  “Anybody got a flash?” Bush asked.

  The first cop reached into his left hip pocket. He thumbed a button, and a circle of light splashed onto the sidewalk.

  “On his face,” Bush said.

  The light swung up onto the dead man’s face.

  Bush swallowed. “That’s Reardon,” he said, his voice very quiet. And then, almost in a whisper, “Jesus, that’s Mike Reardon.”

  There were sixteen detectives assigned to the 87th Precinct, and David Foster was one of them. The precinct, in all truth, could have used 116 detectives and even then been understaffed. The precinct area spread south from the River Highway and the tall buildings which still boasted doormen and elevator operators to the Stem, with its delicatessens and movie houses, on south to Culver Avenue and the Irish section, still south to the Puerto Rican section, and then into Grover’s Park, where muggers and rapists ran rife. Running east and west, the precinct covered a long total of some thirty‐five city streets. And packed into this rectangle—north and south from the river to the park, east and west for thirty‐five blocks—was a population of 90,000 people.

  David Foster was one of those people.

  David Foster was a Negro.

  He had been born in the precinct territory, and he had grown up there, and when he’d turned twenty‐one, being of sound mind and body, being four inches over the minimum requirement of five feet eight inches, having 20/20 vision without glasses, and not having any criminal record, he had taken the competitive Civil Service examination and had been appointed a patrolman.

  The starting salary at the time had been $3,725 per annum, and Foster had earned his salary well. He had earned it so well that in the space of five years he had been appointed to the Detective Division. He was now a third grade detective, and his salary was now $5,230 per annum, and he still earned it.

  At 1:00 A.M., on the morning of July 24, while a colleague named Mike Reardon lay spilling his blood into the gutter, David Foster was earning his salary by interrogating the man he and Bush had picked up in the bar knifing.

  The interrogation was being conducted on the second floor of the precinct house. To the right of the desk on the first floor, there was an inconspicuous and dirty white sign with black letters which announced DETECTIVE DIVISION, and a pointing hand advised any visitor that the bulls hung out upstairs.

  The stairs were metal, and narrow, but scrupulously clean. They went up for a total of sixteen risers, then turned back on themselves and continued on up for another sixteen risers, and there you were.

  Where you were was a narrow, dimly lighted corridor. There were two doors on the right of the open stairway, and a sign labeled them LOCKERS. If you turned left and walked down the corridor, you passed a wooden slatted bench on your left, a bench without a back on your right (set into a narrow alcove before the sealed doors of what had once been an elevator shaft), a door on your right marked MEN’S LAVATORY, and a door on your left over which a small sign hung, and the sign simply read, CLERICAL.

  At the end of the corridor was the detective squadroom.

  You saw first a slatted‐rail divider. Beyond that, you saw desks and telephones, and a bulletin board with various photographs and notices on it, and a hanging light globe and beyond that more desks and the grilled windows that opened on the front of the building. You couldn’t see very much that went on beyond the railing on your right because two huge metal filing cabinets blocked the desks on that side of the room. It was on that side of the room that Foster was interrogating the man he’d picked up in the bar earlier that night.

  “What’s your name?” he asked the man.

  “No hablo inglés,” the man said.

  “Oh, hell,” Foster said. He was a burly man with a deep‐chocolate coloring and warm brown eyes. He wore a white dress shirt, open at the throat. His sleeves were rolled up over muscular forearms.

  “Cuál es su nombre?”he asked in hesitant Spanish.

  “Tomas Perillo.”

  “Your address?” He paused, thinking. “Dirección?”

  “Tres‐tres‐cuatro Mei‐son.”

  “Age? Edad?”

  Perillo shrugged.

  “All right,” Foster said, “where’s the knife? Oh, crap, we’ll never get anywhere tonight. Look, dónde está el cuchillo? Puede usted decirme?”

  “Creo que no.”

  “Why not? For Christ’s sake, you had a knife, didn’t you?”

  “No sé.”

  “Look, you son of a bitch, you know damn well you had a knife. A dozen people saw you with it. Now how about it?”

  Perillo was silent.

  “Tiene usted un cuchillo?”Foster asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re a liar!” Foster said. “You do have a knife. What’d you do with it after you slashed that guy in the bar?”

  “Dónde está el servicio?”Perillo asked.

  “Never mind where the hell the men’s room is,” Foster snapped. “Stand up straight, for Christ’s sake. What the hell do you think this is, the poolroom? Take your hands out of your pockets.”

  Perillo took his hands from his pockets.

  “Now where’s the knife?”

  “No sé.”

  “You don’t know, you don’t know,” Foster mimicked. “All right, get the hell out of here. Sit down on the bench outside. I’m gonna get a cop in here who really speaks your language, pal. Now go sit down. Go ahead.”

  “Bien,” Perillo said. “Dóndé está el servicio?”

  “Down the hall on your left. And don’t take all night in there.”

  Perillo went out. Foster grimaced. The man he’d cut hadn’t been cut bad at all. If they knocked themselves out over every goddamn knifing they got, they’d be busy running down nothing but knifings. He wondered what it would be like to be stationed in a precinct where carving was something you did to a turkey. He grinned at his own humor, wheeled a typewriter over, and began typing up a report on the burglary they’d had several days back.

  When Carella and Bush came in, they seemed in a big hurry. Carella walked directly to the phone, consulted a list of phone numbers beside it, and began dialing.

  “What’s up?” Foster said.

  “That homicide,” Carella answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “It was Mike.”