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and eyes everyone told him were violet, but which he thought
     were a pale bluish-gray. He was wearing a bloodstained blue smock and yellow rubber gloves, and was weighing a liver when
     the detectives walked in. He immediately plopped the organ into a stainless-steel basin, where it sat looking like the Portnoy
     family’s impending dinner. Yanking off one of the gloves, presumably to shake hands, he remembered where the hand had recently
     been, and pulled it back abruptly. He knew why the detectives were here. He got directly to the point.
    “Two to the heart,” he said. “Both bull’s-eyes, and not a bad title for a movie.”
    “I think there was one,” Hawes said.
    “Bull’s-Eyes?”
    “No, no …”
    “You’re thinking of
One-Eyed Jacks
.”
    “No,
Two to the Heart
, something like that.”
    “
Two for the Road
, you’re thinking of,” Blaney said.
    “No, that was a song,” Hawes said.
    “That was ‘One for the Road.’ ”
    “This was a movie.
Two from the Heart
, maybe.”
    “Cause
Two for the Road
was very definitely a movie.”
    Carella was looking at them both.
    “This had the word ‘heart’ in the title,” Hawes said.
    Carella was still looking at them. Everywhere around them were bodies or body parts on tables and countertops. Everywhere
     around them was the stink of death.
    “Heart, heart,” Blaney said, thinking out loud. “
Heart of Darkness
? Because that became a movie, but it was called
Apocalypse Now
.”
    “No, but I think you’re close.”
    “Is it Coppola?”
    “Carella,” Carella said, wondering why Blaney, whom he’d known for at least a quarter of a century, was getting his name wrong.
    “Something Coppola directed?” Blaney asked, ignoring him.
    “I don’t know,” Hawes said. “Who’s Coppola?”
    “He directed the
Godfather
movies.”
    Which reminded Carella of the two hoods in the hotel bar. Which further reminded him of Svetlana’s granddaughter. Which brought
     him full circle to why they were here.
    “The autopsy,” he reminded Blaney.
    “Two to the heart,” Blaney said. “Both of them in a space the size of a half-dollar. Which didn’t take much of a marksman
     because the killer was standing quite close.”
    “How close?”
    “I’d say no more than three, four feet. All the guy did was point and fire. Period.”
    “Was she drunk?” Carella asked.
    “No. Percentage of alcohol in the brain was point-oh-two, well within the normal range. Urine and blood percentages were similarly
     normal.”
    “Can you give us a PMI?”
    “Around eleven, eleven-thirty last night. Ballpark.”
    No postmortem interval was entirely accurate. They all knew that. But Blaney’s educated guess coincided with the time the
     man down the hall had heard shots.
    “Anything else we should know?” Hawes asked.
    “Examination of the skull revealed a schwannoma arising from the vestibular nerve, near the porus acusticus, extending into
     both the internal auditory meatus …”
    “In English, please,” Carella said.
    “An acoustic neuroma …”
    “Come on, Paul.”
    “In short, a tumor on the auditory nerve. Quite large and cystic, probably causing hearing loss, headache, vertigo, disturbed
     sense of balance, unsteadiness of gait, and tinnitus.”
    “Tinnitus?”
    “Ringing of the ears.”
    “Oh.”
    “Liquid chromotography of the coagulated blood disclosed a drug called diclofenac, in concentrations indicating therapeutic
     doses. But the loose correlation between dosage and concentration is a semi-quantitative process at best. All I can say for
     certain is that she was
taking
the drug, not
why
she was taking it.”
    “Why do you
think
she was taking it?”
    “Well, we don’t normally examine joints in a post, and I haven’t here. But a superficial look at her fingers suggests what
     I’m sure a vertebral slice would reveal.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “Lipping on the anterior visible portion.”
    “What’s lipping?”
    “Knobby, bumpy,