The room was forty feet on a side, matchboarded up to the height of a desk, then distempered in some color long forgotten, now more or less that of cocoa powder. Along one wall had been set wooden chairs with pressed, imitation-leather seats; the wall behind them had a smear of darker color from the heads that had rested against it. These were for witnesses and suspects. Overhead were giant fans and lights with green shades of the sort used on factory floors; the ceiling above them was filigreed with gas pipes that no longer carried gas, and the channels that carried electric wiring; and above those were sheets of pressed tin, cobwebbed and darkened by decades of tobacco smoke. In this room, murders that had proved too tough for the precincts or that involved more than one precinct were taken over and—in theory—solved. The Squad had its own lockup just off the big room. Anybody who went in there was assumed to be a killer and would already have been “downstairs,”
