Blood Relatives (13 page)

“Yes, but you see, Patricia, you were so insistent about the
first
identification, and it turned out to be a false identification. So the defense is going to try to make something out of that, I’m sure of it. Which is why I wanted to know whether you’d ever met Mr. Armstrong. Because then, you see, in trying to cover up for your brother, you might have unconsciously picked somebody who was in some way connected with Muriel. But you don’t know Mr. Armstrong.”

“No.”

“Your father mentioned that Muriel went out on dates, and the boys came to pick her up at the house. Do you remember any of those boys?”

“Some of them,” Patricia said.

“Would any of
them
have had black hair and blue eyes? I’m sorry to keep harping on this, Patricia, but I’m positive the identification will be challenged, and anything we can do to help the district attorney—”

“I don’t remember what any of those boys looked like,” Patricia said. “Some of them only went out with her once or twice. I didn’t even know their names, some of them.”

“Well, then that’s the end of that, I guess,” Carella said, and sighed. “There’s just one other thing. Your father mentioned that Muriel kept a diary, said she wrote in it faithfully every night. You shared a room with her, did you ever see her writing in a diary?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Would you describe it to me?”

“It was red leather, with a little strap that locked onto the front cover.”

“When did you last see that diary, Patricia?”

“I guess she was writing in it the night before she was killed.”

“Last Friday night?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she do with it afterward?”

“She locked it and put it back in her drawer. She used to carry the key on a chain around her neck.”

“Which drawer did she keep it in?”

“The top drawer of her dresser.”

“It’s not there now, Patricia. Would you have any idea where it might be?”

“No. That’s where she always kept it.”

“Well,” Carella said, and then shrugged. “Okay, I guess that’s it. Sorry to have bothered you. Thanks a lot, Patricia.”

The man thought of himself as royalty.

He thought of himself as the monarch of all he surveyed. This was
his
city, and as the reigning potentate he was entitled to his daily tithe. He would have sent menials to collect for him, except that he so enjoyed doing it himself. Especially at this time of year. He had been born in September, guessed that had something to do with it. Baby first sees the light of day in a certain season, why, that’s
got
to affect the way he feels about life from that minute on. Imagine being born in February or March, coming bare-ass naked into a world so cold, doctor slapping you, drawing that needle-sharp air into your lungs, enough to make even a prince shudder! He loved making the daily rounds in September, when the skies above were invariably blue and the air was like a maiden’s kiss. Oh, how they loved him! Oh, the things they put out for him each day, his loving subjects! Oh, the surprises! He never knew what the tithe would be, never could even
hope
to guess what gifts he would find in alleyways or mews, curbside container or back-lot carton.

And today—today he had found a mountain of treasure, he could not believe his eyes at first. It was not yet his birthday, and so the barbarian hordes from beyond the city walls were not required to bring a percentage of their plunder through the gates to lay at his feet. Nor was it yet Christmas, when those of the Christian faith who inhabited the lands to the south and to the west were required to bring to him in measure equal to his weight riches beyond imagination. And yet, here upon the Cos Corner plain, his subjects had strewn for his pleasure a carpet of gifts extending to the very horizon, causing him to widen his jaded old eyes in surprise and smack his toothless gums in delight. In the
shadow of the bridge he danced upon the endless treasure trove, plucked a skeletal umbrella from one glittering mound, twirled it over his head, trailed a tattered pink boa on the fragrant breeze, poked and picked for trifles and fancies, tried on a pair of pale-blue gloves and a pendant with a broken stone, and then settled back into an easy chair with its stuffing showing, and in the late-afternoon light began to read a book bound in bright-red leather. On the front page of the book, he read the printed words:

THIS IS THE DIARY OF

And below that, written by hand on the appropriate blank line:

The name sounded familiar, one of his loyal subjects, no doubt—Muriel Stark. Had he read another book about her adventures? Was this a sequel? Muriel Stark. And then he remembered seeing her name in a newspaper he had plucked from a garbage can just a few days ago, and he remembered, too, that she’d been murdered. He got out of the chair and tucked the diary into the pocket of his long black coat. Then, tossing the pink boa back over his shoulder, twirling the stark umbrella over his head, he went looking for a policeman.

Carella had always believed that anyone who kept a diary did so only because he was hoping it would someday be read by another person. The lock would be picked, the strap would be cut, the pages would be opened, and the diarist would stand revealed to the prying eyes of a stranger. In all the diaries he had read during his years as a cop, he had never come across one in which the diarist seemed unaware of a potential audience. Some diarists plainly acknowledged the possibility of later readership by writing entire pages in code; presumably there were
some
entries they considered fit for broadcast but others they chose to keep secret. The codes were very often so simple, however, that they ceased to be codes at all—further indication that the diarist intended them to be understood all along. It did not take a mastermind, for example, to crack a code that moved each letter one letter forward in the alphabet, so that the world’s most famous epithet would appear as GVDL ZPV. Some of the codes were more complicated,
but none of them were terribly difficult to decipher. Usually, the pages written in code dealt with specific sex episodes or wild fantasies. Never violence. It was rather strange. If a man committed an act of violence, the entry would appear in his diary in plain, undisguised English—”Today I broke Charlie’s head with a hammer.” But if he’d had an unusually heady
sex
experience, then the entry would appear in code—”In Carol’s room yesterday, I did DVOOJMJOHVT on her.” Dvoojmjohvt was neither Dutch nor Swedish. Nor was it a voodoo curse. It was merely brilliant code, the kind any diarist hoped would be licked in six seconds flat. Such was the way of all diarists. They pretended that the words they committed to the pages of their secret books were sacred and profane, but at the same time they were clearly writing for an audience.

Muriel Stark’s diary did nothing to change Carella’s mind.

He did not read it in the best of surroundings: a detective squadroom at ten past 5:00 on a Friday afternoon is not exactly the reading room of the public library. The diary had been delivered to him via radio motor patrol car direct from the 106th in Riverhead. The Riverhead patrolman to whom Crazy Tom had turned over the diary (“I suggest you take a look at this, my good man,” Tom had said) had checked out the first page and had been alert enough to recognize the name of a homicide victim. Suspecting a possible hoax, he had nonetheless given the diary to his sergeant, and the sergeant—also suspecting a hoax—had taken it back to the 106th, where he’d passed it on to the desk officer, who immediately sent it upstairs to the detective squadroom, where a detective/3rd named Di Angelis was at last smart enough not to add his fingerprints to the collection already there. Accepting the diary on a clean white handkerchief, he carried it into his lieutenant’s office, and the lieutenant checked out the name on the first page, and then called Homicide and was informed that the case
was being handled by a Detective Stephen Louis Carella of the 87th Squad, who could be reached at Frederick 7-8024. The lieutenant from the 106th had called Carella at once, and then had offered to send the diary downtown in a radio motor patrol car. Carella had graciously accepted the offer. Now, wearing white cotton gloves and gingerly turning pages, Carella read Muriel Stark’s diary, and became more and more convinced that she (like other diarists he had known) was writing for posterity, each word chiseled on the granite of the page. It was difficult to tell whether Muriel was actually feeling anything at all, or feeling everything with the same unbearable intensity, or simply pretending to feel things for the benefit of her future unseen audience. She used no codes, unless one could consider flowery language or literary allusions codes of a sort. At times her prose was sickeningly sentimental. At other times it was morose and self-pitying. She wrote passionately of womanly yearnings and desires without the slightest indication that she understood either. Even in April, when she fell madly in love and began recording what she referred to as “the single most exciting experience in my life,” she seemed thoroughly aware of her phantom reader, and so her lover became a phantom as well, never named, never described except in language so ethereal that it vanished like mist.

“Get your fuckin’ hands off me, you cocksucker!” Carella looked up from the diary. Meyer Meyer was shoving a husky white man toward the detention cage across the room. The man’s hands were cuffed behind his back, but he kept trying to butt Meyer with his head as Meyer shoved him along. Meyer would shove at him, and the man would stumble forward a few feet and then turn and lower his head like a goat and try to butt Meyer all over again. As he rushed forward, Meyer would put his hands out to stop the thrust, and then he would spin the man around and give him another shove toward the detention cage. At the cage,
Hal Willis was waiting with the door open. There was an amused expression on his face. He was thinking that Meyer would have made a good bullfighter.

“Leave me the fuck
alone!
” the man shouted, and lowered his head again, and started running forward again. This time Meyer didn’t shove him. This time he brought the hard edge of his right hand down on the back of the man’s neck, and then brought his knee up into his chest. Then he dragged the man over to the cage and pushed him into it, and angrily slammed the door shut.

“You son of a bitch,” the man said.

“Shut up!” Meyer said.

“What’d he do?” Willis asked.

“Stuck an icepick in his father’s eye,” Meyer said, and took out his handkerchief, and wiped his face, and then blew his nose, and glared at the man in the cage.

Carella turned his attention back to the diary.

On a Saturday afternoon in May, Muriel’s lover had taken her to a movie, and had kissed her for the first time. She described the kiss as being “sweet as falling rain,” and wrote that her “heart stopped dead.” Two days later her lover had met her downtown, after work. She explained to the diary again (although this information had appeared in an earlier entry) her reasons for having dropped out of high school. And she explained again, to the diary (or to her spectral audience), just how much she liked her job as a bookkeeper at the bank, and how good it made her feel to be able to contribute money to the house, though Uncle Frank and Aunt Lillian practically had to have the money
forced
upon them, but still they accepted it, and this made her feel good, to know she was independent and self-sufficient. But what made her feel better than anything in the world was knowing that she was loved, knowing that when he touched her she soared “to a sunrise of expectation. How long will it be before he wants from me
the ultimate ecstasy? I will give him whatever he wishes,” she had written. “I will open myself fully unto him, for he is my love.”

The telephone on Kling’s desk rang, and Carella looked up. Kling snatched the receiver from its cradle, and said, “87th Squad, Kling. Yeah, just a minute, I’ve got that right here on my desk someplace. Genero? Can you hold just a minute? Right, hold on. Okay, here it is, have you got a pencil? We’ve got a problem here because it could have been fired from two different guns. That’s right, Genero. Look, I’m telling you what Ballistics told
me.
You want an argument, call them. Guy I spoke to there is named Firbisher.
Firbisher.
F-I-R-B-I-S-H-E-R. He said the twist was sixteen inches left, and the groove diameter was .402 inches. Now this is what that means, Genero. That means it could’ve been either a .38-40 Colt or a .41 Colt, because both those revolvers have the same rate of twist and groove diameters. How can that
be?
What do you
mean,
how can that be? It
is,
that’s how it can be. Look, Genero, how do
I
know how he made his tests? Am I a Ballistics expert? He probably put the thing under a microscope, how the hell do I know what he did? You asked me to take a message if he called, and he called, and that’s what he told me, and that’s what I’m giving you. This is not my case, Genero, this is your case. That’s right, it
is
your case. I just
said
that, didn’t I? It’s your case, yes.
Who’s
sticking his nose into it? Genero, you want to know something? You’re a pain in the ass, Genero. How you ever got promoted into this squadroom is beyond me. That’s right. That’s what I said. Right.
Sure,
remember it. I
hope
you remember it. I hope you never
forget
it, Genero. I hope, in fact, you never ask me to do another favor for you, Genero, because you know what I’ll say? I’ll say no. That’s right. That’s what I’ll say. I’ll say no. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do. Good-bye, Genero.”

He slammed the receiver down onto the cradle, muttered, “You no-good bastard,” and then realized that Carella—sitting at
his own desk not three feet away—was watching him. “Genero,” Kling said in explanation, and went back to his typing.

Carella went back to reading Muriel’s diary.

The “sunrise of expectation” continued all through the month of May. As Carella waited patiently for Muriel’s defloration, the suspense became almost unbearable. He followed the girl’s panting declarations of undying love with bated breath, wondering when her anonymous lover would make the move that would at once rob her of her virginity and at the same time satisfy a sunrise that was becoming increasingly more purple as the summer approached. By the end of May, Carella began to think her lover didn’t exist at all. Muriel had invented him, he was a figment of her imagination, a true phantom, a character created only to add a little zip to the diary. Or, if he
did
exist, he was certainly a shy and cautious soul whose explorations thus far had been limited to touching her breasts “naked beneath the bra,” as she put it. In the first few weeks of June, Muriel began wondering when he would “move below the waist.”

Carella, by this time, was hoping the lover would move to Alaska. He kept turning the pages of the diary, though, trapped in a pornographic treatise that lacked not only socially redeeming value but also specific gravity. As Carella read about all the various “aches,” “tingles,” “throbs,” and “tremors” Muriel was feeling above the waist
(and
below), he couldn’t help thinking that if only her nameless lover had been treated to a prepublication glimpse of her diary, he’d have leapt upon her in broad daylight and violated her in public, even
if
it frightened the horses. But through most of June her mysterious lover remained blithely unaware that Muriel was longing to be “taken in passionate delight,” as she put it, a ripe blossom waiting to be plucked, so to speak. Carella lived through the agonizing details of a stealthy finger-walk up the inside of Muriel’s thigh, a trembling hand sliding into her panties
to probe at last “the aching mound where my sweet womanhood lies.” This was on the twenty-eighth of June, a Saturday. On the Fourth of July, while fireworks exploded overhead (symbolically and cinematically, and perhaps realistically as well), Muriel Stark lost her virginity on a deserted Sands Spit beach. The entry concerning this gala event had been made on July 4, but immediately beneath the printed date on that page, Muriel had written, “
Really
July 5, since it’s now 3:00 A.M., and I’ve just returned from Sands Spit.” There followed a passage describing in detail the steamy adolescent intensity that had led to the sandy seduction anticipated for months by thousands of breathless fans. Reading the diary with a critical eye, Carella had to admit that the big seduction scene was given all the space it required, spilling over from the page allotted to July 4 and onto the pages for NOTES at the back of the diary. Nor had Muriel ever written better. What with the fireworks and all, the big seduction scene was a critical and commercial smash.

And then the tone of the diary changed abruptly.

Where there had been almost daily entries
before
the night of Muriel’s defloration, the first entry after the one for July 4 was July 15. Carella kept turning blank pages, vaguely disappointed, wondering if the diary had ended with the big sex scene, and beginning to think again that the whole damn thing had been invented for the dubious pleasure of the reader. When he came to the July 15 entry, he read through it with a rising feeling of disorientation, scarcely able to believe it had been written by the same person who’d written the preceding pages. It was as though he’d been reading a novel (he still could not shake the belief that
none
of this was real) by a writer whose style he’d begun to understand if not particularly admire, and suddenly
another
writer had been brought in to finish the book. The entry was brief, the language plain, the gushing adolescent seemed to have disappeared overnight (or rather in
the space of eleven days, the time that had elapsed since the entry of July 4 and the entry of July 15), to be replaced by someone who sounded strangely sober and…well, troubled.

He did not know why Muriel suddenly seemed unable to handle what she’d been yearning for since that first kiss in the balcony of a movie house in the merry month of May. He did not know until he read the entry for August 1. It was then that he learned who her lover was, and realized he was
not
a phantom, and understood why she had not named him till now. She had kept the secret until it became impossible to bear, but now she was forced to share it—if only with her diary. On August 1 her diary became her confessor and her confidante, and Carella was certain she locked it from that night forward. And whatever else he had previously believed about Muriel (and all
other
diarists), he changed his mind abruptly when he realized she was now putting down her thoughts only in an attempt to find answers to problems that were suffocating her. The unfortunate thing was that by the time of her last entry on September 5, the night before her murder, she seemed to have found none of the answers she was so desperately seeking.