Cop Hater (18 page)

"I'd have preferred an American policeman," Miss Bailey said in all seriousness.

"Well, I sometimes pass for one," Carella answered, amused.

"Very well."

There was a long pause. Carella waited.

Miss Bailey showed no signs of continuing the conversation.

"Miss ... ?"

"Shhl" she said sharply.

Carella waited.

After several moments, the woman said, "I know who killed those policemen."

Carella leaned forward, interested. The best leads sometimes came from the most unexpected sources. "Who?" he asked.

"Never you mind," she answered.

Carella waited.

"They are going to kill a lot more policemen," Miss Bailey said. "That's their plan."

"Whose plan?"

"If they can do away with law enforcement, the rest will be easy," Miss Bailey said. "That's their plan. First the police, then the National Guard, and then the regular Army."

Carella looked at Miss Bailey suspiciously.

"They've been sending messages to me," Miss Bailey said. "They think I'm one of them, I don't know why. They come out of the walls and give me messages."

"Who comes out of the walls?" Carella asked.

"The cockroach-men. That's why I asked if there was a bug in this corner."

"Oh, the... the cockroach-men."

"Yes."

"I see."

"Do I look like a cockroach?" she asked.

"No," Carella said. "Not particularly."

"Then why have they mistaken me for one of them? They look like cockroaches, you know."

"Yes, I know."

"They talk by radio-nuclear-thermics. I think they must be from another planet, don't you?"

"Possibly," Carella said.

"It's remarkable that I can understand them. Perhaps they've overcome my mind, do you think that's possible?"

"Anything's possible," Carella agreed.

"They told me about Reardon the night before they killed him. They said they would start with him because" he was the Commissar of Sector Three. They used a thermo-dis-integrator on him, you know that, don't you?" Miss Bailey paused, and then nodded. ".45 calibre."

"Yes," Carella said.

"Foster was the Black Prince of Argaddon. They had to get him. That's what they told me. The signals they put out are remarkably clear, considering the fact that they're in an alien tongue. I do wish you were an American, Mr. Carella. There are so many aliens around these days, that one hardly knows who to trust."

"Yes," Carella said. He could feel the sweat blotting the back of his shirt. "Yes."

"They killed Bush because he wasn't a bush, he was a tree in disguise. They hate all plant life."

"I see."

"Especially trees. They need the carbon dioxide, you see, and plants consume it. Especially trees. Trees consume a great deal of carbon dioxide."

"Certainly."

"Will you stop them, now that you know?" Miss Bailey asked.

"We'll do everything in our power," Carella said.

"The best way to stop them . . ." Miss Bailey paused and rose, clutching her purse to her narrow bosom. "Well, I don't want to tell you how to run your business."

"We appreciate your help," Carella said. He began walking her to the railing. Miss Bailey stopped.

"Would you like to know the best way to stop these cockroach-men? Guns are no good against them, you know. Because of the thermal heat."

"I didn't know that," Carella said. They were standing just inside the railing. He opened the gate for her, and she stepped through.

"There's only one way to stop them," she said.

"What's that?" Carella asked.

Miss Bailey pursed her mouth. "Step on them!" she said, and she turned on her heel and walked past Clerical, and then down the steps to the first floor.

Bert Kling seemed to be in high spirits that night.

When Carella and Havilland came into the hospital room, he was sitting up in bed, and aside from the bulky bandage over his right shoulder, you'd never know anything was wrong with him. He beamed a broad smile, and then sat up to talk to the two visiting detectives.

He chewed on the candy they'd brought him, and he said this hospital duty was real jazzy, and that they should get a look at some of the nurses in their tight white uniforms.

He seemed to bear no grudge whatever against the boy who'd shot him. Those breaks were all part of the game, he supposed. He kept chewing candy, and joking, and talking until it was almost time for the cops to leave.

Just before they left, he told a joke about a man who had three testicles.

Bert Kling seemed to be in high spirits that night.

Chapter EIGHTEEN

the three funerals
followed upon each other's heels with remarkable rapidity. The heat did not help the classical ceremonies of death. The mourners followed the caskets and sweated. An evil, leering sun grinned its blistering grin, and freshly turned soil—which should have been cool and moist —accepted the caskets with dry, dusty indifference.

The beaches that week were jammed to capacity. In Clam's Point at Mott's Island, the scorekeeper recorded a recordbreaking crowd of two million, four hundred and seventy thousand surf seekers. The police had problems. The police had traffic problems because everyone who owned any sort of a jalopy had put it on the road. The police had fire-hydrant problems, because kids all over the city were turning on the johnny pumps, covering the spout with a flattened coffee can, and romping beneath the improvised shower. The police had burglary problems, because people were sleeping with their windows open; people were leaving parked cars unlocked, windows wide; shopkeepers were stepping across the street for a moment to catch a quick Pepsi Cola. The police had "floater" problems, because the scorched and heat-weary citizens sometimes sought relief in the polluted currents of the rivers that bound Isola—and some of them drowned, and some of them turned up with bloated bodies and bulging eyes.

On Walker Island, in the River Dix, the police had prisoner problems because the cons there decided the heat was too much for them to bear, and they banged their tin cups on the sweating bars of their hot cells, and the cops listened to the clamor and rushed for riot guns.

The police had all sorts of problems.

Carella wished she were not wearing black. He knew this was absurd. When a woman's husband is dead, the woman wears black.

But Hank and he had talked a lot in the quiet hours of the midnight tour, and Hank had many times described Alice in the black nightgowns she wore to bed. And try as he might, Carella could not disassociate the separate concepts of black: black as a sheer and frothy raiment of seduction; black as the ashy garment of mourning.

Alice Bush sat across from him in the living room of the Calm's Point apartment. The windows were wide open, and he could see the tall Gothic structures of the Calm's Point College campus etched against the merciless, glaring blue of the sky. He had worked with Bush for many years, but this was the first time he'd been inside his apartment, and the association of Alice Bush in black cast a feeling of guilt over his memories of Hank.

The apartment was not at all what he would have expected for a man like Hank. Hank was big, rough-hewn. The apartment was somehow frilly, a woman's apartment. He could not believe that Hank had been comfortable in these rooms. His eyes had scanned the furniture, small-scaled stuff, stuff in which Hank could never have spread his legs. The curtains at the windows were ruffled chintz. The walls of the living room were a sickeningly pale lemon shade. The end tables were heavy with curlycues and inlaid patterns. The corners of the room contained knick-knack shelves, and the shelves were loaded with fragile glass figurines of dogs and cats and gnomes and one of Little Bo Peep holding a delicately blown, slender glass shepherd's crook.

The room, the apartment, seemed to Carella to be the intricately cluttered design for a comedy of manners. Hank must have been as out of place here as a plumber at a literary tea.

Not so Mrs. Bush.

Mrs. Bush lounged on a heavily padded chartreuse love seat, her long legs tucked under her, her feet bare. Mrs. Bush belonged in this room. This room had been designed for Mrs. Bush, designed for femininity, and the Male Animal be damned.

She wore black silk. She was uncommonly big-busted, incredibly narrow-waisted. Her hip bones were wide, flesh-padded, a woman whose body had been designed for the bearing of children—but somehow she didn't seem the type. He could not visualize her squeezing life from her loins. He could only visualize her as Hank had described her—in the role of a seductress. The black silk dress strengthened the concept. The frou-frou room left no doubt. This was a stage set for Alice Bush.

The dress was not low-cut. It didn't have to be.

Nor was it particularly tight, and it didn't have to be that, either.

It was not expensive, but it fitted her figure well. He had no doubt that anything she wore would fit her figure well. He had no doubt that even a potato sack would look remarkably interesting on the woman who had been Hank's wife.

"What do I do now?" Alice asked. "Make up beds at the precinct? That's the usual routine for a cop's widow, isn't it?"

"Did Hank leave any insurance?" Carella asked.

"Nothing to speak of. Insurance doesn't come easily to cops, does it? Besides . . . Steve, he was a young man. Who thinks of things like this? Who thinks these things are going to happen?" She looked at him wide-eyed. Her eyes were very brown, her hair was very blond, her complexion was fair and unmarred. She was a beautiful woman, and he did not like considering her such. He wanted her to be dowdy and forlorn. He did not want her looking fresh and lovely. Goddamnit, what was there about this room that suffocated a man? He felt like the last male alive, surrounded by bare-breasted beauties on a tropical island surrounded by man-eating sharks. There was no place to run to. The island was called Amazonia or something, and the island was female to the core, and he was the last man alive.

The room and Alice Bush.

The femaleness reached out to envelop him in a cloying, clinging embrace.

"Change your mind, Steve," Alice said. "Have a drink."

"All right, I will," he answered.

She rose, displaying a long white segment of thigh as she got to her feet, displaying an almost indecent oblivion to the way she handled her body. She had lived with it for a long time, he supposed. She no longer marveled at its allure. She accepted it, and lived with it, and others could marvel. A thigh was a thigh, what the hell! What was so special about the thigh of Alice Bush?

"Scotch?"

"All right."

"How does it feel, something like this?" she asked. She was standing at the bar across from him. She stood with the loosehipped stance of a fashion model, incongruous because he always pictured fashion models as willowy and thin and flat-chested. Alice Bush was none of these.

"Something like what?"

"Investigating the death of a colleague and friend."

"Weird," Carella said.

"I'll bet."

"You're taking it very well," Carella said.

"I have to," Alice answered briefly.

"Why?"

"Because I'll fall all to pieces if I don't. He's in the ground, Steve. It's not going to help for me to wail and moan all over the place."

"I suppose not."

"We've got to go on living, don't we? We can't simply give up because someone we love is gone, can we?"

"No," Carella agreed.

She walked to him and handed him the drink. Their fingers touched for an instant. He looked up at her. Her face was completely guileless. The contact, he was sure, had been accidental.

She walked to the window and looked out toward the college. "It's lonely here without him," she said.

"It's lonely at the house without him, too," Carella said, surprised. He had not realized, before this, how really attached he had become to Hank.

"I was thinking of taking a trip," Alice said, "getting away from things that remind me of him."

"Things like what?" Carella asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Alice said. "Like . . . last night I saw his hair brush on the dresser, and there was some of that wild red hair of his caught in the bristles, and all at once it reminded me of him, of the wildness of him. He was a wild person, Steve." She paused. "Wild."

The word was female somehow. He was reminded again of the word portrait Hank had drawn, of the real portrait before him, standing by the window, of the femaleness everywhere around him on this island. He could not blame her, he knew that. She was only being herself, being Alice Bush, being Woman. She was only a pawn of fate, a girl who automatically embodied womanhood, a girl who . . . hell!

"How far have you come along on it?" she asked. She whirled from the window, went back to the love seat and collapsed into it. The movement was not a gracious one. It was feline, however. She sprawled in the love seat like a big jungle cat, and then she tucked her legs under her again, and he would not have been surprised if she'd begun purring in that moment.