Nocturne Read Online Free Page A

Doesn’t anybody in this city speak English anymore?”
    “Where’d she put this purse?” Carella asked calmly.
    “In her coat pocket.”
    “The pocket of the mink,” he said, nodding.
    “No, she wasn’t wearing a mink. She was wearing a cloth coat.”
    The detectives looked at him.
    “Are you sure about that?” Hawes asked.
    “Positive. Ratty blue cloth coat. Scarf on her head. Silk, I think. Whatever. Pretty. But it had seen better days.”
    “Cloth coat and a silk scarf,” Carella said.
    “Yeah.”
    “You’re saying that when she came in here at eleven o’clock last night …”
    “No, I’m not saying that at all.”
    “You’re
not
saying she was wearing a cloth coat and a silk scarf?”
    “I’m not saying she came in at eleven last night.”
    “If it wasn’t eleven, what time
was
it?”
    “Oh, it was eleven, all right. But it was eleven yesterday morning.”
    They found the change purse in the pocket of a blue cloth coat hanging in the bedroom closet.
    There was a dollar and a penny in it.

2

    I n the year 1909, there used to be forty-four morning newspapers in this city. By 1929, that figure had dropped to thirty.
     Three years later, due to technological advances, competition for circulation, standardization of the product, managerial
     faults, and, by the way, the Great Depression, this number was reduced to a mere three. Now there were but two.
    Since there was a killer out there, the detectives didn’t want to wait till four, five a.m ., when both papers would hit the newsstands. Nor did they think a call to the morning tabloid would be fruitful, mainly because
     they didn’t think it would run an obit on a concert pianist, however famous she once may have been. It later turned out they
     were wrong; the tabloid played the story up big, but only because Svetlana had been living in obscurity and poverty after
     three decades of celebrity, and her granddaughter—but that was another story.
    Hawes spoke on the phone to the obituary editor at the so-called quality paper, a most cooperative man who was ready to read
     the full obit to him until Hawes assured him that all he wanted were the names of Miss Dyalovich’s surviving kin. The editor
     skipped to the last paragraph, which noted that Svetlana was survived by a daughter, Maria Stetson, who lived in London, and
     a granddaughter, Priscilla Stetson, who lived right here in the big bad city.
    “You know who she is, don’t you?” the editor asked.
    Hawes thought he meant Svetlana.
    “Yes, of course,” he said.
    “We couldn’t mention it in the obit because that’s supposed to be exclusively about the deceased.”
    “I’m not following you,” Hawes said.
    “The granddaughter. She’s Priscilla Stetson. The singer.”
    “Oh? What kind of singing does she do?”
    “Supper club. Piano bar. Cabaret. Like that.”
    “You wouldn’t know
where
, would you?” Hawes asked.
    In this city, many of the homeless sleep by day and roam by night. Nighttime is dangerous for them; there are predators out
     there and a cardboard box offers scant protection against someone intent on robbery or rape. So they wander the streets like
     shapeless wraiths, adding a stygian dimension to the nocturnal landscape.
    The streetlamps are on. Traffic lights blink their intermittent reds, yellows and greens into the empty hours of the night,
     but the city seems dark. Here and there, a bathroom light snaps on. In the otherwise blank face of an apartment building,
     a lamp burns steadily in the bedroom of an insomniac. The commercial buildings are all ablaze with illumination, but the only
     people in them are the office cleaners, readying the spaces for the workday that will begin at nine Monday morning. Tonight—it
     still feels like night even though the morning is already an hour and a half old—the cables on the bridges that span the city’s
     river are festooned with bright lights that reflect in the black waters below. Yet all seems so dark,