Heat

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The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

The five-year-old, unmarked sedan Steve Carella was driving to the scene was fitted with an air conditioner that had been repaired last summer and that now — when it was desperately needed — had perversely decided to malfunction. The windows front and back were open, but the air that flowed through the car was sodden and hot, the humidity in this city frequently accompanying the soaring temperature like a leaden ballet dancer lifting a fat partner. Bert Kling sat suffocating in silence beside Carella as the car moved uptown and crosstown.

The initial call had been received by Communications on High Street at 8:30 a.m., an Emergency 911 call that had been routed immediately to a dispatcher who’d radioed car Eight-Seven Frank to the scene. The responding patrolmen weren’t at all surprised to find a corpse: the woman who’d called 911 had reported that she’d just come home to find her husband dead in their apartment. The dispatcher had ended his radio message with “See the lady,” and the lady had indeed been waiting for the police in the lobby of the building. But they had not called back to the station house with a request for detectives until they’d entered the sixth-floor apartment and seen for themselves that there was, in fact, a body on the living-room floor.

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