‘Don’t call me and don’t come over,’ she told him, and suddenly she could see Norman with horrible clarity, standing across from her building in the pouring rain with the collar of his overcoat turned up and a streetlight faintly illuminating the lower half of his face — standing there like one of the hellish, brutal villa ins in a novel by ‘Richard Racine.’
‘Rosie, I don’t understand — ‘
‘I know, and that’s actually for the best,’ she said. Her voice was wavering, starting to break apart. ‘Just stay away from me, Bill.’
She hung the telephone up quickly, stared at it a moment, then voiced a loud, agonized cry.
She turned the phone out of her lap with the backs of her hands. The handset flew to the end of its cord and lay on the floor, its open-line hum sounding strangely like the hum of the crickets which had sent her off to sleep on Monday night. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the sound, felt that if she had to listen to it for even another thirty seconds, it would split her head in two. She got up, went to the wall, squatted, and pulled the phone-jack. When she tried to get up again, her trembling legs would not support her. She sat on the floor, covered her face with her hands, and let the tears have their way with her. There was really no choice.
Anna had kept saying over and over again that she wasn’t sure, that Rosie couldn’t be sure, either, whatever she might suspect. But Rosie was sure. It was Norman. Norman was here, Norman had lost whatever remained of his sanity, Norman had killed Anna’s ex-husband, Peter Slowik, and Norman was looking for her.
7
Five blocks beyond the Hot Pot, where he had come within four seconds of meeting his wife’s eyes through the plate-glass window, Norman turned into a discount store called No More Than 5. ‘Everything in the Store Priced Under $5.00!’ the store’s motto read. It was printed below a wretchedly executed drawing of Abraham Lincoln. There was a broad grin on Lincoln’s bearded face, he was dropping a wink, and to Norman Daniels he looked quite a bit like a man he had once arrested for strangling his wife and all four of his children. In this store, which was literally within shouting distance of Liberty City Loan & Pawn, Norman bought all the disguise he intended to wear today: a pair of sunglasses and a cap with CHISOX
printed above the bill.
As a man with just over ten years’ experience as a detective inspector, Norman had come to believe that disguises only belonged in three places: spy movies, Sherlock Holmes stories, and Halloween parties. They were especially useless in the daytime, when the. only thing makeup looked like was makeup and the only thing a disguise looked like was a disguise. And the gals in Daughters and Sisters, the New Age whorehouse where his pal Peter Slowik had finally admitted sending his rambling Rose, were apt to be particularly sensitive to predators slinking around their waterhole. For gals like these, paranoia was a lot more than a way of life; it was full state-of-the-art.
The cap and dark glasses would serve his purpose; all he had planned for this early evening was what Gordon Satterwaite, his first detective partner, would have called ‘a little rekky.’ Gordon had also been fond of grabbing his young associate and telling him it was time to do a little of what he called ‘the old gumshoe.’ Gordon had been a fat, smelly, tobacco-chewing slob with brown teeth, and Norman had despised him almost from the first
moment he had seen him. Gordon had been a cop for twenty-six years and an inspector for nineteen, but he had no feel for the work. Norman did. He didn’t like it, and he hated the jizzbags he had to talk to (and sometimes even associate with, if the job was undercover), but he had a feel for it, and that feel had been invaluable over the years. It had helped bring him through the case which had resulted in his promotion, the case which had turned him —
however briefly — into a media golden boy. In that investigation, as in most that involved organized crime, there came a point where the path the investigators had been following disappeared into a bewildering maze of diverging paths, and the straight way was lost. The difference in the drug case was that Norman Daniels was — for the first time in his career —
in charge, and when logic failed, he did without hesitation what most cops could not or would not do: he had switched over to intuition and then trusted his entire future to what it told him, plunging forward aggressively and fearlessly.
To Norman there was no such thing as ‘a little rekky’; to Norman there was only trolling.
When you were stumped, you went somewhere that had a bearing on the case, you looked at it with your mind perfectly open, not junked up with a lot of worthless ideas and half -baked suppositions, and when you did that you were like a guy sitting in a slow-moving boat, casting your line out and reeling it in, casting out and reeling in, waiting for something to grab hold. Sometimes nothing did. Sometimes you got nothing but a submerged tree-limb or an old rubber boot or the kind offish not even a hungry raccoon would eat.
Sometimes, though, you hooked a tasty one.
He put on the hat and the sunglasses, then turned left onto Harrison Street, now on his way to Durham Avenue. It was easily a three-mile hike to the neighborhood where Daughters and Sisters was located, but Norman didn’t mind; he could use the walk to empty out his head. By the time he reached 251, he would be like a blank sheet of photographic paper, ready to receive whatever images and ideas might come, without trying to change them so they would fit his own preconceptions. If you didn’t have any preconceptions, you couldn’t do that.
His overpriced map was in his back pocket, but he only stopped to consult it once. He had been in the city less than a week, but he already had its geography much more clearly fixed in his mind than Rosie did, and again, this was not so much training as it was a gift.
When he had awakened yesterday morning with his hands and shoulders and groin aching, with his jaws too sore to open his mouth more than halfway (the first attempt at a wakeup yawn as he swung his feet out of bed had been agony), he had done so with the dismaying realization that what he had done to Peter Slowik — aka Thumperstein, aka The Amazing Urban Jew boy — had probably been a mistake. Just how bad a mistake was hard to say, because a lot of what had happened at Slowik’s house was only a blur to him, but it had been a mistake, all right; by the time he had reached the hotel newsstand, he’d decided there was no probably about it. Probably was for the dinks of the world, anyway — this had been an unspoken but fiercely held tenet of his life’s code ever since his early teens, when his mother had left and his father had really started to crank up the beatings.
He had bought a paper at the newsstand and leafed through it rapidly in the elevator as he went back up to his room. There was nothing in it about Peter Slowik, but Norman had found that only a minor relief. Thumper’s body might not have been discovered in time for the news to make the early editions; might, in fact, still be lying where Norman had left it (where he thought he had left it, he amended; it was all pretty hazy), crammed in behind the basement water-heater. But guys like Thumper, guys who did lots of public service work and had lots of bleeding-heart friends, didn’t go undiscovered for long. Someone would get worried, other someones would come around looking for him at his cozy little rabbit-hole on Beaudry Place, and eventually some someone would make an exceptionally unpleasant discovery behind the water-heater.
And sure enough, what had not been in the paper yesterday morning was there today, on
page one of the Metro section: CITY SOCIAL WORKER SLAIN IN HOME. According to the piece, Travelers Aid had been only one of Thumper’s after-hours activities . . . and he hadn’t exactly been poor, either. According to the paper, his family — of which Thump had been the last —
had been worth a pretty good chunk of change. The fact that he had been working in a bus station at three in the morning, sending runaway wives to the whores at Daughters and Sisters, only proved to Norman that the man was either short a few screws or sexually bent.