Bread

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It was August, and the temperature outside was ninety-six degrees, and the squadroom was not air-conditioned, and Detective Steve Carella was hot. The three rotating electric fans did little more than circulate air that was stale and moist, and there was a hole in one of the window screens (put there by some fun-loving, rock-throwing youngsters) that allowed the entrance of all kinds of flying vermin. A pusher was asleep in the detention cage in one corner of the room, and the phones on two vacant desks were ringing, and Cotton Hawes was talking to his girlfriend on another phone at another desk, and Carella’s shirt was sticking to his back and he wished he was still on vacation.

This was Wednesday, and he had come back to work on Monday, and half the 87th Squad (or so it seemed) had in turn gone on vacation, and here he was sitting behind a typewriter and a pile of paperwork, a tall, wide-shouldered man who normally looked athletic and lean and somewhat Chinese, what with brown eyes that slanted downward in his face, but who now looked wilted and worn and weary and beleaguered, like a man whose undershorts are slowly creeping up into the crack of his behind, which his were most surely and inexorably doing on this miserable hot day in August.

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