Inside the precinct, in the detective squadroom, a cop named Dave Murchison was being questioned by Byrnes and Hawes.

  “Who delivered the letter, Dave?”

  “A kid,” Murchison said.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know. Ten? Eleven? Somewhere around there.”

  “What color hair?”

  “Blond.”

  “Eyes?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “How tall?”

  “Average height for a kid that age.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Dungarees and a striped T-shirt.”

  “What color stripes?”

  “Red.”

  “That ought to be easy,” Hawes said.

  “Any hat?” Byrnes asked.

  “No.”

  “What kind of shoes?”

  “I didn’t see his feet from behind the desk.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He asked if I was the desk sergeant. I told him I was. He handed me the letter.”

  “Did he say who it was from?”

  “No. He just handed it to me and said, ‘Here.’”

  “What then?”

  “He walked out.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “I was alone with the desk, sir. I yelled for him to stop, but he didn’t. I couldn’t leave the desk, and nobody else was around.”

  “What about the desk lieutenant?”

  “Frank was having a cup of coffee. I couldn’t stick with the switchboard and also go chasing a kid.”

  “Okay, Dave, don’t get excited.”

  “I mean, what the hell, Frank wants a cup of coffee, that’s his business. He only went upstairs to Clerical. How the hell were we supposed to know this would happen?”

  “Don’t get excited, Dave.”

  “I’m not excited. I’m just saying there was nothing wrong with Frank getting a cup of coffee, that’s all. In this heat you got to make allowances. A man sits behind that desk, he begins to—”

  “Okay, Dave, okay.”

  “Look, Pete,” Murchison said, “I’m sorry as hell. If I’d known this kid was going to be important—”

  “It’s all right, Dave. Did you handle the letter much?”

  Murchison looked at the floor. “The letter and the envelope both. I’m sorry, Pete. I didn’t think this would be—”

  “It’s all right, Dave. When you get back to the switchboard, turn on your radio, will you? Give a description of this kid to all the cars in the precinct. Get one car to cruise and alert every foot patrolman. I want the kid brought in as soon as he’s located.”

  “Right,” Murchison said. He looked at Byrnes. “Pete, I’m sorry if I—”

  Byrnes clapped him on the shoulder. “Forget it,” he said. “Get those calls out, will you?”

  The maximum pay for a patrolman in the city that cradled the 87th Precinct was $5,015 a year. That is not a lot of money. In addition to that $5,015, the patrolman received $125 for the annual maintenance of his uniforms. That is still not a lot of money.

  It becomes even less money when the various deductions are made every two weeks on payday. Four bucks comes out automatically for hospitalization, and another buck and a half is deducted for the precinct bed tax. This tax pays the salary of police widows who make up the dozen or so precinct beds that are used in emergencies when two shifts are on duty—and that are sometimes used by anyone wanting to catch a little shut-eye, emergency or no. Federal income tax takes another bite. The Police Benevolent Association, a sort of union for the law enforcers, gets its cut. The High Street Journal, the police publication, is usually subscribed to, hence another bite. If the cop has been decorated, he donates to the Police Honor Legion. If he’s religious, he donates to the various societies and the various charities that visit the precinct each year. His paycheck, after it has been divided and subdivided, usually comes to $130 every two weeks.

  That amounts to sixty-five bucks a week no matter how you slice it.

  If some cops take graft—and some cops do take graft—it may be because they’re slightly hungry.

  A police force is a small army, and as with any military organization, the orders must be obeyed no matter how ridiculous they may sound. When the foot patrolmen and the radio motor patrolmen of the 87th received their orders that morning of July 24, they thought the orders were rather peculiar. Some shrugged. Some cursed. Some simply nodded. All obeyed.

  The orders were to pick up a ten-year-old boy with blond hair who was wearing dungarees and a red-striped T-shirt.

  It sounded simple.

  At 9:15 A.M. the photograph of the letter came back from the lab. Byrnes called a meeting in his office. He put the letter in the center of his desk, and he and three other detectives studied it.

  “What do you make of it, Steve?” he asked. He asked Steve Carella first because of many reasons. To begin with, he thought Carella was the best cop on his squad. True, Hawes was beginning to shape up, even though he’d made a bad start shortly after his transfer to the precinct. But Hawes, in Byrnes’s estimation, had a long way to go before he would equal Carella. Secondly, and quite apart from the fact that Carella was a good cop and a tough cop, Brynes felt personally attached to him. He would never forget that Carella had risked his life, and almost lost it, trying to crack a case in which Byrnes’s son had been involved. In Byrnes’s mind, Carella had become almost a second son. And so, like any father with a son in the business, he asked for Carella’s opinion first.

  “I’ve got my own theories about guys who send letters like this,” Carella said. He picked up the photograph and held it to the light streaming through the windows. He was a tall, deceptively slender man, giving an impression of strength without the slightest hint of massive power. His eyes were slightly slanted and together with his clean-shaven look, they gave him a high- cheeked, somewhat-Oriental appearance.

  “What’s your idea, Steve?” Byrnes asked.

  Carella tapped the photograph. “The first question I ask is why? If this joker is about to commit homicide, he sure as hell knows there are laws against it. The obvious way to do murder is to do it secretly and quietly and try to escape the law. But no. He sends us a letter. Why does he send us a letter?”

  “It’s more fun for him this way,” said Hawes, who had been listening intently to Carella. “He’s got a double challenge—the challenge of killing someone and the challenge of getting away with it after he’s raised the odds.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Carella said, and Byrnes watched the interplay between the two cops and was pleased by it. “But there’s another possibility. He wants to get caught.”

  “Like this Heirens kid in Chicago, a few years back?” Hawes said.

  “Sure. The lipstick on the mirror. Catch me before I kill again.” Carella tapped the letter. “Maybe he wants to get caught, too. Maybe he’s scared stiff of killing and wants us to catch him before he has to kill. What do you think, Pete?”

  Byrnes shrugged. “It’s a theory. In any case, we still have to catch him.”

  “I know, I know,” Carella said. “But if he wants to get caught, then the letter isn’t just a letter. Do you follow me?”

  “No.”

  Detective Meyer nodded. “I get you, Steve. He’s not just warning us, he’s tipping us.”

  “Sure,” Carella said. “If he wants to get caught, if he wants to be stopped, this letter’ll tell us just how to stop him. It’ll tell us who and where.” He dropped the letter on Byrnes’s desk.

  Detective Meyer walked over to it and studied it. Meyer was a very patient cop, and so his scrutiny of the letter was careful and slow. Meyer, you see, had a father who was something of a practical joker. The senior Meyer, whose name was Max, had been somewhat startled and surprised when his wife had announced she was going to have a change-of-life baby. When the baby had been born, Max had played his little joke on humanity and incidentally on his son. He had given the baby the name of Meyer, which added to the surname of Meyer, had caused the infant to emerge as Meyer Meyer. The joke had doubtless been a masterpiece of hilarity. Except perhaps to Meyer Meyer. The boy had grown up as an Orthodox Jew in a predominantly Gentile neighborhood. The kids on the block had been accustomed to taking out their petty hatreds on scapegoats, and what better scapegoat than one whose name presented a ready-made chant: “Meyer Meyer, Jew-on-Fire!” In all fairness, they had never put Meyer Meyer to the stake. But he had suffered many a beating in the days of his youth, and faced with what seemed to be the overwhelming odds of life, he had developed an attitude of extreme patience toward his fellow man.

  Patience is an exacting virtue. Perhaps Meyer Meyer had emerged unscarred and unscathed. Perhaps. He was nonetheless completely bald. There are a lot of men who are completely bald. But Meyer Meyer was only thirty-seven years old.

  Patiently, exactingly, he studied the letter now.

  “It doesn’t say a hell of a lot, Steve,” he said.

  “Read it,” Byrnes told him.

  “‘I will kill The Lady tonight at eight,’” Meyer quoted. “‘What can you do about it?’”

  “Well, it tells us who,” Carella said.

  “Who?” Byrnes asked.

  “‘The Lady,’” Carella said.

  “And who’s she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “It doesn’t tell us how,” Meyer said, “or where.”

  “But it does give a time,” Hawes put in.

  “Eight. Tonight at eight.”

  “You really think this character wants to get caught, Steve?”

  “I really don’t know. I’m just offering a theory. I do know one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Until we get a report from the lab, we’d better start with what we’ve got.”

  Byrnes looked at the letter.

  “Well, what the hell do we have?”

  “The Lady,” Carella answered.

  Fats Donner was a stool pigeon.

  There are stool pigeons and there are stool pigeons, and there is no law in the city that prevents you from getting your information from whomever you want to. If you like Turkish baths, there is no better stool pigeon than Fats.

  When Hawes had worked with the 30th Squad, he had had his own coterie of informers. Unfortunately, his tattletales had all been highly specialized men who were hip only to the crimes and criminals within the 30th Precinct. Their limited scope did not extend to the brawling, sprawling 87th. And so, at 9:27 A.M. that morning, while Steve Carella went to see his own preferred stoolie—a man named Danny Gimp—and while Meyer Meyer checked the Lousy File for any female criminals who might have used “The Lady” as an alias, Cotton Hawes spoke to Detective Hal Willis, and Willis told him to look up Donner.

  A call to Donner’s apartment drew a blank.

  “He’s probably at the baths,” Willis said, and he gave Hawes the address. Hawes checked out a car and drove downtown.

  The sign outside the place read:

  REGAN BATHS

  Turkish

  Steam

  Galvanized

  Hawes walked in, climbed a flight of wooden steps leading to the second floor of the building, and stopped before a desk in the lobby. The climb had already brought perspiration to Hawes’s forehead. He wondered why anyone would go to a Turkish bath on a day like today, and then he further wondered why anyone would go swimming in January, and then he thought the hell with it.

  “What can I do you for?” the man at the desk asked. He was a small man with a sharp nose. He wore a white T-shirt upon which the name REGAN BATHS was stenciled in green. He also wore a green eyeshade.

  “Police,” Hawes said, and he flashed the tin.

  “You got the wrong place,” the man said. “This is a legit bath. Somebody steered you wrong.”

  “I’m looking for a man named Fats Donner. Know where I can find him?”

  “Sure,” the man said. “Donner’s a regular. You got no beef with me?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Alf Regan. I run the joint. Legit.”

  “I only want to talk to Donner. Where is he?”

  “Room 4, middle of the hall. You can’t go in like that, mister.”

  “What do I need?”

  “Just your skin. But I’ll give you a towel. Lockers are back there. Anything valuable, you can leave here at the desk. I’ll put it in the safe.”

  Hawes unloaded his wallet and watch. He debated for a moment, and then unclipped his service revolver and holster and put them on the desk.

  “That thing loaded?” Regan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Mister, you better—”

  “It’s got an internal safety,” Hawes said. “It can’t go off unless the trigger is pulled.”

  Regan looked at the .38 skeptically. “Okay, okay,” he said, “but I wonder how many people accidentally get shot by guns that got internal safeties.”

  Hawes grinned and headed for the lockers. While he was undressing, Regan brought him a towel.

  “I hope you got a thick hide,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Donner likes them hot. I mean hot.”

  Hawes wrapped the towel around his middle.

  “You got a good build,” Regan said. “Ever do any boxing?”

  “A little.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Navy.”

  “Any good?”

  “Fair.”

  “Take a punch,” Regan said.

  “What?”

  “Throw a punch at me.”

  “What for?”

  “Go ahead, go ahead.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Hawes said.

  “Just take a swing. I want to see something.” Regan put up his hands in a fighting stance.

  Hawes shrugged, feinted with his left, and then crossed a right at Regan’s jaw, pulling the punch just before it hammered home.

  “Why’d you pull it?” Regan demanded.

  “I didn’t want to knock your head off.”

  “Who taught you that feint?”

  “A lieutenant j.g. named Bohan.”

  “He taught you good. I manage a couple of fighters on the side. You ever think of going into the ring?”

  “Never.”

  “Think about it. This country could use a heavyweight champ.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Hawes said.

  “You’d make a hell of a lot more than the city pays you, you can bet your ass on that. Even doing tankers, you’d make a hell of a lot more.”

  “Well, I’ll think about it,” Hawes said. “Where’s Donner?”

  “Down the hall. Listen, take my card. You ever decide to take a whack at it, give me a ring. Who knows? Maybe we got another Dempsey here, huh?”

  “Sure,” Hawes said. He took the card Regan offered him and then looked down at the towel. “Where do I put the card?” he asked.

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Well, give it to me. I’ll catch you on the way out. Donner’s right down the hall. Room 4. You can’t miss it. There’s enough steam in there to move the Queen Mary.”

  Hawes started down the corridor. He passed a thin man who looked at him suspiciously. The man was naked, and his suspicion was bred by the towel Hawes wore. Hawes passed the man guiltily, feeling very much like a photographer in a nudist colony. He found Room 4, opened the door, and was hit in the face by a blast of heat that almost sent him reeling back down the corridor. He tried to see through the layers of shifting steam in the room, but it was impossible.

  “Donner?” he called.

  “Here, man,” a voice answered.

  “Where?”

  “Over here, man. Sittin’. Who is it?”

  “My name’s Cotton Hawes. I work on Hal Willis’s squad. He told me to contact you.”

  “Oh, yeah. Come on in, man, come on in,” the bodiless voice said. “Close the door. You’re lettin’ steam out and drafts in.”

  Hawes closed the door. If he had ever wondered how a loaf of bread feels when the oven door seals it in, he now knew. He worked his way across the room. The heat was suffocating. He tried to suck air into his lungs, found only heat passing into his throat. A figure suddenly materialized in the shifting hot fog.

  “Donner?” Hawes asked.

  “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, boss,” Donner answered, and Hawes grinned despite the heat.

  Fats was truly fat in the plural. He was citywide, he was statewide, he was continental. Like a giant, quivering bowl of white flesh, he sat on the marble bench against the wall, languishing in the fetid air, a towel draped across his crotch. Each time he breathed, layers of fat shook and trembled.

  “You’re a cop, ain’t you?” he asked Hawes.

  “Sure.”

  “You said Willis’s squad, but that coulda meant like other things. Willis gave me the nod, huh?”

  “Yes,” Hawes said.

  “Good man, Willis. I saw him dump a guy who musta weighed four hundred pounds right on his ass. Judo. He’s a judo expert. You reach for him and push-pull-click-click! your arm’s in a plaster cast. Man, we in danger.” Donner chuckled. When he chuckled, everything he owned chuckled with him. The motion was making Hawes a little seasick.

  “So what do you want to know?” Donner asked.

  “Know anybody called ‘The Lady’?” Hawes said, figuring it was best to come straight to the point before he collapsed of heat prostration.