Blood Relatives Read Online Free PDF Page A

her hard. She was bleeding a lot when I left the house. So I didn’t want any trouble with the law, I mean a man and his wife can work things out between them, am I right? We’ve always worked things out between us. So okay, I slap her around every now and then, but she knows I love her.”
    “Uh-huh,” Carella said.
    “I do.”
    “Sure.”
    “So now I told you what you wanted to know, so how about let’s forget this assault stuff, okay?”
    “I’ve got a better idea,” Carella said.
    “Yeah, what’s that?”
    “How about we send a car over to your house, see how your wife is doing, first of all. Then how about we check those bloodstains on your shirt with your wife’s blood, just to make sure it isn’t somebody else’s blood, okay? That’ll have to wait till morning, when the lab opens. Meanwhile, just for the fun of it, how about we book you for two counts of assault, okay?”
    “ Two counts? My wife won’t press charges against me, she loves me too much.”
    “We don’t.”
    “Huh?”
    “Me. And my partner. One, two. Two counts,” Carella said. “And that may be the least of your worries, Mr. Sully. Depending on what the lab has to say about those bloodstains.”
    The lab got back to them at 10:00 the next morning. It told them that whereas Muriel Stark’s blood had been of the O group, and Patricia Lowery’s was of the A group; and whereas the scene of the crime and the bodies and clothing of both victims (the dead one and the living one) had been liberally sprinkled or spattered or smeared with blood from both groups, the stains on Louis Sully’s shirt were nonetheless of the B group, which substantiated his story about the fracas with his wife, since her blood happened to be in that group too. As for the lady, Sully had fractured not only her nose, but her jaw and her collarbone as well. At about the same time Patricia Lowery was being released from the hospital that morning, Mrs. Louis Sully was being moved from a ward to a semi-private room, which her doting husband had requested for her.
    Carella and Kling, in the squadroom of the 87th, went through their file of known sex offenders, and then put out a request for similar files from every other detective squad in the city. It was 11:00 on a Sunday morning. Carella went home to his family. Kling went directly to Augusta Blair’s apartment.
    During World War II, American bomber crews would fly out from bases in England to strike at enemy targets on the continent. They would fly through exploding flak, helpless in the grip of the bombsight, unable to veer from enemy fire, unable to dodge enemy aircraft until the bombs were released and the controls were back again in the hands of the pilot. And in the evening and in the night they would sit and drink in English country pubs, throw darts with the good old boys, sing an American song or two, and try to forget the terror they had known in the skies over Germany.
    During the Vietnam war, combat infantrymen were flown to Saigon by helicopter from bases in the boonies, and from Saigon they were jetted to Hawaii or Japan for what was called R&R—Rest & Recuperation. They would go back into the jungle afterward, presumably refreshed and capable of once more dealing with the everyday horrors of warfare. There existed, for the airmen in World War II, and even for the foot soldiers in the Vietnam war, a curious form of double-think that allowed them to be combat troops one moment and quasi-civilians the next. In the morning you dropped a stick of bombs down a factory smokestack, and in the evening you dropped an egg into your lager. On Friday you were laying machine-gun fire across a trail leading into a suspect hamlet, and on Monday you were laying a whore in Honolulu. Helped you keep your sanity, they said. Moderation in everything, and everything in moderation.
    It was something like that for cops.
    When it got too horrible, you went home. You took a shower and changed your clothes. You mixed