Evan Hunter - Romance

“I’m not required to give out information on my tenants,” he said. He had not yet given them his name or offered them his hand. He had simply materialized from the bowels of the building when the doorman picked up a handset at the entrance desk and punched out a mysterious number.

“What’s your name, sir?” Parker asked.

He had found over the years that using the word “sir” very often caused them to wet their pants.

“Howard Rank,” the super said.

“Mr. Rank,” Parker said, “I don’t know what you mean by required or not required, who’s saying you’re required to do anything here? We’re asking a simple question we can get the answer to just by looking at the mailboxes in your hallway there, for which we don’t need any authority but the shield in our pocket. We did you the courtesy of asking you the question instead of walking over there to the mailboxes, so why don’t you do us the courtesy of giving a simple answer instead of required or not required?”

“She lives in the building, yes,” Rank said.

“Good, now can you tell us what apartment she lives in, or do we have to go look at the mailbox for that, too?”

“She lives in apartment 4C.”

“Thank you,” Parker said. “Now can you tell us whether she lives alone up there, or whether there’s somebody living with her?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Rank said.

“Why not?” Brown asked sharply, glowering.

“Super-tenant confidentiality,” Rank said.

The drugstore on the corner of Easton and Hedley had been at this same location for fifty years; it said so in gold-leaf lettering on the front plate-glass window. Stepping into the shop, Carella had the feeling he was walking into an apothecary somewhere in London, though he’d never been to London and didn’t really know whether or not they were called apothecaries there. But there was something reminiscent of Charles Dickens here, something about the little bell tinkling over the paned-and-paneled front door, in itself a rarity in this city of instant break-ins. The heavy glass-fronted cabinets, the thick wooden shelves, the bell jars and decanters all seemed to contain rare oils, ointments, and unguents transported from the farthest reaches of the world. There was something ineffably timeworn and musty about this shop and the creaky old man behind the counter. This was a shop to enter on a rainy day.

“Yes, gentlemen?” the man asked. “How may I help you?”

Like the Dickens character he most surely was, he wore a long-sleeved lavender-colored shirt and a little purple bow tie, and a plaid vest over which a watch chain ran from pocket to buttonhole. He squinted at them through narrow little glasses, dark eyes bright behind them. His skin was the color and texture of thin parchment paper.

“We’re police officers,” Carella said at once, though the man seemed not at all afraid of imminent robbery.

“How do you do,” he said, “I’m Graham Quested.”

Dickens for sure, Carella thought.

“We’re trying to track a prescription,” Kling said.

“Ah yes,” Quested said.

He told them he’d had many such requests from the police over the years, usually in cases where overdoses of prescription drugs seemed indicated during autopsy. He also told them he’d been held up sixty-two times at this location since he opened the store fifty-one years ago come August.

“All sixty-two of the robberies took place during the past twenty years,” he said. “I guess that says something about the way this city is changing, doesn’t it?”

Carella guessed it did.

“What we’re looking for,” he said, “is a prescription you might have filled for a woman named Andrea Packer.”

“Not a name that’s familiar to me,” Quested said. “Which doesn’t mean anything, of course. She could have been someone who just walked in off the street, rather than one of my regular customers. When would this have been, would you know?”

“I’m sorry, we don’t.”

“A prescription for what?”

“Dalmane.”

“Very popular sleeping pill. Its generic name is flurazepam, one of the benzodiazepines. More than fifteen, sixteen million prescriptions written for it each year. Do you know her doctor’s name?”

“No.”

“Andrea Packer, did you say?”

“P-A-C-K-E-R.”

“Do you have an address for her?”

“714 South Hedley.”

“Right around the corner. Was she a suicide?”

“No, sir,” Carella said.

“Because benzodiazepines are rarely used in suicides,” Quested said. “Have to take ten to twenty times the normal dose to do yourself in that way. Dalmane’s got the longest half-life of any of the ben…”

“Half-life?”

“That’s the time it takes to eliminate half’ the drug the person ingested. If you took a ten-milligram capsule of something, for example, and its half-life is two hours, then an hour after ingestion there’d still be five mils in the bloodstream.”

“What’s the half-life of Dalmane?”

“Forty-seven to a hundred hours,” Quested said.

Kling whistled.

“You said it. A person using Dalmane can sometimes have as much of the stuff in his blood during the day as he has at night. Let’s have a look at the files, shall we?”

And then, surprisingly for a fellow out of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, he led them to a computer in a back room brimming with mortars and pestles, and searched first for Andrea Packer’s name, and then her address, and then the brand name Dalmane and next the generic name flurazepam and lastly the chemical group benzodiazepine and came up with nothing each and every time.

“Oh gentlemen,” he said, looking truly regretful, “I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.”

The door to apartment 4D was opened by a young black man wearing blue jeans, a gray T-shirt with a maroon Ramsey University seal on its front, and horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a peering, suspicious look. He had asked them to hold their badges up to the peephole in the door before he’d opened it for them, and now he studied their shields and ID cards at greater leisure and with closer scrutiny. Satisfied at last, he said, “What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble,” Brown said.

“What’s your name, son?” Parker asked pleasantly.

He had determined over the years that using the word “son” also caused them to wet their pants, especially when they were nineteen years old and black, the way this kid seemed to be.

“Daryll Hinks,” the kid said.

“Do you know the lady who lives in 4C next door?”

“Only by sight.”

“Andrea Packer, that her name?” Brown asked.

“I don’t know her name. Long blond hair, nineteen, twenty years old, good-looking girl. What’d she do?”

“Nothing. Ever see her going in or out of that apartment?”

“Sure.”

“Apartment 4C, right?”

“Yeah. Next door.”

“Ever seen anybody else going in or out?”

“Sure.”

“A man, for example?”

“What is she, a hooker?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re asking about men going in and out…”

“No, no, we’re just thinking of a specific man.”

“Did this man do something?”

“Yeah, he threw himself out a window,” Parker said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.’ .

“Gee.”

“So would you have seen a guy maybe six feet tall, husky white guy, twenty-six years old, brown hair, brown…”

“Yeah,” Hinks said.

“Liked to wear painter’s coveralls, high-topped workman’s…”

“Yeah, I’ve seen him. Talked to him in the elevator, in fact.”

“Ever see him going in or coming out of apartment 4C?”