Long Time No See (9 page)

“Thank you.”

Again, he waited. He decided that homicide was an intrusion. Nobody wanted intrusions in their lives, nobody wanted you calling from the big city to ask about a man who’d passed this way ten years ago. Hell with that. There was a hospital to run here, a facility. Lots of sick people here. I’ll put you through to Records. Records might be interested. Records dealt with history, the distant past and the more recent. I’ll put you through to Records because we here among the quick albeit sick just can’t be bothered, you see, with corpses who once lived in the neighborhood.

“Records, Sergeant Hollister speaking.”

“This is Detective Carella, 87th Squad, I’m looking for some information about a homicide victim.”

Sergeant Hollister whistled. “Shoot,” he said.

“The name is James Harris, he was in the Fort Mercer hospital ten years ago.”

“Any middle name?”

“Randolph.”

“This’ll take some time,” Hollister said. “Let me get back to you.”

“The number here is Frederick 7-8024. But, Sergeant…”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m really more interested in talking to someone who might have known him while he was there. I mean, rather than you reading to me from his records.”

“Well, let me see what the records indicate, okay, sir? I’ll get back to you in a little while.”

“Sergeant, this is a homicide.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that.”

“Thank you, I’ll be waiting for your call.”

There was a click on the line. Carella looked up at the wall clock. The time was 10:37
A.M.

“How do you spell vehicular?” Genero asked.

“You’ve got the dictionary right there, just look it up,” Carella said.

“How can I look it up if I don’t know how to spell it?”

“Well, you know it starts with a V, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but
then
what?” Genero said.

Carella looked up at the clock again.

The time was 10:38
A.M.

The call from upstate did not come till a few minutes past 11:00. By then Carella had called the IS for a routine check on Charles C. Clarke, and had finished typing his updated reports in triplicate. The IS had promised to get back to him at once. He expected he would hear from them by Monday unless he called them again later in the day. He also expected he would have to call the hospital back. In America, and maybe throughout the whole wide world for all he knew, nobody ever got anything done unless you called twice. And then followed the second call with a letter. And then called again a week after the follow-up letter. He suspected it had been this way in ancient Rome, just before the barbarian hordes broke through the northern barricades and rode their ponies into the streets. Senators picking up the skirts of their togas and running for their lives, clutching unanswered tablets to their chests. Secretaries running along behind them, chewing gum, clothes in disarray.

“87th Squad, Carella.”

“This is Colonel Anderson, Fort Mercer Hospital.”

“Yes, sir,” Carella said.

“A Sergeant Hollister in Records called to say you were interested in a patient I treated several years back.”

“Yes, sir, a man named James Harris.”

“Hollister said he’d been murdered, is that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Anderson said. “What is it you want to know, Mr. Carella?”

“This will sound ridiculous.”

“Try me.”

“I was talking to his mother this morning, and she told me he was having nightmares.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to talk to anyone who might know something about them.”

“The nightmares?”

“Yes, the nature of the nightmares.”

“I’m a plastic surgeon, I didn’t have anything to do with his mental rehabilitation. He’d been through three other hospitals before he reached us, you understand. Our goal was to prepare him for civilian life after the terrible trauma he’d suffered. The wound was a particularly vicious one, requiring a great deal of reconstructive surgery. But it was the psychiatric team who worked toward adjusting him realistically to his new situation. They’re the ones who’d know about the nightmares.”

“Who headed up the team, can you tell me that?”

“That would have been Colonel Konigsberg.”

“I wonder if I could speak to him.”

“He’s no longer here. He was transferred to Walter Reed in Washington, you might try him there. That would be Colonel Paul—well, wait a minute, he was a colonel when he left here, he might well be a brigadier general by now.”

“Colonel Anderson, where would the psychiatric records be? Would they still be there at Fort Mercer?”

“I would imagine so, yes.”

“If I drove up there this afternoon, could I have a look at them?”

“That could be arranged.”

Carella looked up at the wall clock. “Would two o’clock be all right?”

“Yes, fine. I’ll leave word at the gate to pass you through. Could I have your full name, please?”

“Detective Stephen Carella. That’s C-a-r-e-l-l-a. And it’s Stephen with a p-h.”

“The General Hospital is to the right of the redbrick administration building. When you come through the main gate, keep to your right and park in the oval marked for visitors. There’s a receptionist just inside the entrance doors, she’ll tell you how to find me. My office is on the second floor.”

“I’ll be there at two,” Carella said.

“Yes, fine,” Anderson said. “I’ll see you then.”

Carella hung up, looked at the clock again, and then checked the duty chart on the wall. Today was supposed to be Meyer’s day off; he called him at home anyway. Sarah Meyer answered the phone, recognized his voice, and said, “Oh no.”

“Is he in the middle of something?”

“We’re going to a wedding.”

“What time?”

“No trick questions, Steve,” Sarah said. “I’ll put him on.”

Carella waited. When Meyer came on the line, he said at once, “No way.”

“I’m driving up to Fort Mercer,” Carella said.

“Where’s Fort Mercer?”

“Up near Castleview.”

“Have a nice drive.”

“Who’s getting married?”

“Irwin the Vermin.”

“Your nephew?”

“My nephew. Only he grew up to be a mensch, can you imagine? Steve, I can’t go with you, I’m sorry. I still have to pick up my tuxedo.”

“Will you have time to make just one stop?”

Meyer sighed.

“Meyer?”

“Yeah, yeah. Where do you want me to go?”

“Sam Grossman told me there was soil under Jimmy Harris’s fingernails. Check out the apartment, will you? Maybe he buried whatever the killer was looking for.”

“Where do you bury something in an apartment?”

“Did you notice any window boxes?”

“I wasn’t looking for any.”

“Well, check out the sills, and if there aren’t any boxes, you might go down to the backyard, see if anything’s been buried recently.”

“That’s a nice job for a person on a Saturday when he has to get dressed for a wedding.”

“What time is the wedding?”

“Three o’clock.”

“That gives you almost four hours.”

“To go digging up a backyard, and get my tuxedo, and shower and shave, and drive the whole family to Adams Boulevard. Why are you going to Fort Mercer?”

“Jimmy Harris was having nightmares.”

“So am I,” Meyer said, and hung up. Carella smiled and put the receiver back on its cradle.

The phone rang again almost at once. It was the IS calling back to say that Charles C. Clarke had no criminal record.

The apartment was heavy with the stillness of death.

Someone had swept up the garbage that was strewn over the kitchen floor, but the rest of the place was still a shambles. Meyer wondered who would eventually clean it up. The chalked outline of Isabel’s body marked the place near the refrigerator where she’d lain crookedly in death. Sooner or later someone would wash the kitchen floor, wash away the chalked outline and the bloodstains on the linoleum. Sooner or later someone else would rent the apartment. One day the new tenant would casually mention that a murder had taken place in this kitchen: “Found the woman right here near the refrigerator, her throat was slit.” “No kidding?” his visitor would say, and then they would go on to discuss the latest baseball standings.

For now, Isabel Harris was vaguely defined by her chalked outline on the floor and the dried blood on the linoleum. And in the other rooms, her torn furniture and scattered clothing. He had read someplace that blind people put clothing of different colors in different drawers, so that they would not inadvertently wear a green tie with a purple shirt, or a red blouse with an orange skirt. They identified clothing, too, by different stitches sewed into hems or shirttails, their fingers becoming eyes, touch becoming sight. He could not imagine being blind. He thought he would kill himself if suddenly he lost his eyesight.

Above the kitchen sink, there was a small window covered with frost; the apartment was cold, the super had undoubtedly turned off all the radiators the moment the police were gone—waste not, want not, and no sense making the
farshtinkener
Arabs richer than they already were. With the heel of his gloved hand Meyer rubbed at the frost, clearing a rough circle through which he saw first the brick wall of the building opposite and then the outside windowsill.

There was a flower box on the sill.

The dried and withered stalks of last summer’s blooms lay like casualties across the frozen soil in the box. Meyer tried the window; more often than not, they were painted shut in city apartments. It opened easily. He took the box in off the sill, put it on the countertop, and closed the window again. From the tangle of forks, knives, and spoons on the kitchen floor, he picked up a tablespoon and began digging at the soil in the box. The crusted upper layer resisted his initial thrusts, and then suddenly gave way to softer earth. Someone had been digging here recently; the soil was loose, the spoon moved it without effort. He took off his gloves and shoved his hands deep into the soil. Nothing. He looked around for something he could dump the soil onto or into, opened the door to the cabinet under the sink, and found a nest of brown paper bags. Tearing one of these open, he spread it on the countertop and began spooning earth onto it.

In a little while the window box was empty.

There had been nothing in it but soil.

Meyer shoveled a spoonful of that soil into an evidence envelope for transmission to Grossman at the lab. Then he left the apartment and went down to the backyard.

The General Hospital at Fort Mercer was built just before the Spanish-American War. Carella was so informed by the WAC sergeant who was leading him to the room where the records were kept. He had no reason to doubt her word; the place
looked
turn-of-the-century, with high vaulted ceilings and thick walls, windows that rose from the floor to twice a man’s height. They had taken the elevator down from Colonel Anderson’s office and were walking through a ground-level corridor that resembled a colonnade running along one side of a cloister. Beyond the windows were a bloomless garden and a lawn that rolled in hillock after hillock to the River Harb below. In the distance, on a point of land jutting out from the shore, Carella could see the gray walls of Castleview State Penitentiary. He knew a lot of people in that prison, all of them convicted felons. They had been, so to speak, business associates.

The sergeant was an attractive blonde—in her early thirties, he guessed—wearing her olive-drab uniform with all the authority of a fashion model, low heels clicking rhythmically on the tiled floor of the corridor, hips swaying, blue eyes catching the flat November light and reflecting it.

“Makes you think they were
expecting
the damn war, doesn’t it?” she said. “Otherwise, why would they have built
two
hospitals here? You know what they call
this
one, don’t you?”

“Yes. General Hospital.”

“Do you know the joke?”

“No, what joke is that?”

“Is there one for the enlisted men?”

Carella looked at her.

“The enlisted men,” she said.

“Oh.
General
Hospital.”

“Right, you’ve got it,” she said, and laughed. Carella suddenly wondered if she was flirting. He decided she wasn’t. But maybe she was. No, he decided she wasn’t.

“Here we are,” she said, and stepped swiftly to a massive wooden door on the right-hand side of the corridor, and opened it.

Carella followed her into a huge room crammed with metal filing cabinets. Again there were vaulted ceilings and tall windows streaming light. The cabinets were arranged in rows, like cemetery markers, stretching from the door to the farthest end of the room. The task of finding James Harris’s medical history in this room that echoed filing cabinets suddenly seemed overwhelming. Not five minutes ago Colonel Anderson had told him the sergeant would help him locate whatever he needed. Now Carella wondered if anything less than a full platoon could manage the job. His dismay must have showed on his face.

“Don’t let it scare you,” she said. “It’s really pretty well organized. We’ll find the file in a jiffy, and then I’ll help you wade through it. Do I call you Detective Carella or Mr. Carella, or what?”

“What do I call you?” he said.

“Janet.”

“Steve.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

They might have had trouble finding the file in the jiffy Janet had promised, if it weren’t for James Harris’s middle name. Over the years since the hospital was built, no fewer than forty-seven James Harrises had passed this way, the victims of no fewer than four wars; it had been a busy time for America. But only two of the wounded soldiers were named James
Randolph
Harris, and one of them was white and the other was black, so that ended the five-minute search. The folder was thicker than the search had been, if girth could be measured against minutes like apples against oranges.

Janet led Carella to another wooden door and then through it into an adjoining smaller room that seemed almost monastic—severe white walls, small windows, a simple wooden table with high-backed chairs around it. He realized all at once that many of his references today were ecclesiastical in nature: the squadroom resembling a cathedral, the corridor a cloister, and now a room he equated with a monastery cell. He all but expected a tonsured man in a brown hooded habit to come through the other door carrying a manuscript to be illuminated.

“This is my favorite place in the entire hospital,” Janet said, and pulled a chair from the table, and sat.

“How shall we work this?” he asked.

“Depends on what you’re looking for,” she said, and crossed her legs. She had good legs. He wondered again if she was flirting. And decided she wasn’t.

“I’m looking for anything that mentions the nightmares Harris was having.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s split the file. You work forward from the back, I’ll work toward the middle from the front. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” Carella said.

“Has anyone ever told you your eyes slant downward?” Janet said.

“Yes.”

“They do.”

“I know.”

“Mm,” she said, and nodded, and smiled briefly.

“Well,” he said, “let’s get to work. I really appreciate your helping me this way.”

“Orders is orders,” she said, and smiled again.

They worked in silence, sampling the file as they might have vintage wine—tasting, discarding, tasting again, cup by cup, page by page. It was Janet who came across the first mention of the nightmares.

“Here’s something,” she said.

The something was a memo from a Major Ralph Lemarre to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Konigsberg regarding a dream related to the major by Pfc. James Randolph Harris.

It is shortly before Christmas.

Jimmy’s mother and father are decorating a Christmas tree. Jimmy and four other boys are sitting on the living-room floor, watching. Jimmy’s father tells the boys they must help him decorate the tree. The boys refuse. Jimmy’s mother says they don’t have to help if they’re tired. Christmas ornaments begin falling from the tree, crashing to the floor, making loud noises that startle Jimmy’s father. He loses his balance on the ladder and falls to the floor, landing on the shards of the broken Christmas tree ornaments and accidentally cutting himself. The carpet is green, his blood seeps into it. He bleeds to death on the carpet. Jimmy’s mother is crying. She lifts her skirt to reveal a penis.

“What do you make of it?” Janet asked.

“I can’t even figure out my
own
dreams,” Carella said.

“Let’s see what Major Lemarre thinks.”

The major thought little or nothing at this point. This was the first time the dream had been related to him, and there was no indication in his memo that he believed it would become a recurring nightmare. His only comment related to information he had gleaned from previous interviews with Jimmy. The boy’s father had been killed in an automobile accident when Jimmy was six, and his mother had taken on the responsibility of raising the family alone. Major Lemarre speculated that the part of the dream attributing male sex organs to a female might have had something to do with Sophie Harris becoming both mother
and
father to young Jimmy.

“Well,” Janet said, and shrugged. It was clear that the interpretation of dreams left her cold.

Carella understood her position. He had grown up in a family where dreams were thought of as omens of events to come. If you dreamt that seven men were carrying eight bales of cotton up four steps, then you had best run to your local bookie and bet 784 for that day’s number. If you dreamt that Aunt Clara fell off the roof, it would be a good idea to contact your neighborhood mortician or at least reserve a room at the nearest hospital. Nobody in Carella’s family thought of dreams as clues to personality or behavior. It was only when he joined the police force, or more specifically when he became a detective, that he began to think of dreams in a different way. It was a police psychiatrist who told him that a recurring dream could be thought of as a dimly lighted tunnel to the past. The patient and the analyst, working together, could illuminate that tunnel, reconstruct whatever trauma was causing the persistent dream, and thereby free the patient to deal with it on a realistic level rather than a fixated one. None of which made too much sense to Carella at the time.

He was, however, the sort of man who, once presented with an idea, would not let go of it until he understood it to his satisfaction. This did not necessarily mean understanding it completely. He still didn’t know exactly how Ballistics figured out the rifling twist or the number of lands and grooves on a suspect bullet, but he had a fair working knowledge of how they went about it, and that was enough. Similarly, he thought he understood the psychoanalytic process as well as a layman might. He did not subscribe to the theory that all homicides were rooted in the distant past; he would leave such speculation to California mystery writers who seemed to believe that murder was something brewed in a pot for half a century, coming to a boil only when a private detective needed a job. The last time Carella had met a private detective investigating a homicide was never.

But this morning Sophie told him that her son had recently contacted an old Army buddy. All right, that was a link to the past, a link to a man Jimmy had not seen, literally, for the past ten years. If he was going back into his past for something—and Sophie seemed to believe it was for assistance with an illegal enterprise—then perhaps Carella should go back into the past as well. Which is why he was here today. To explore that dimly lighted tunnel, to learn whether or not anyone here at the hospital had been able to unravel the nightmares that caused Jimmy to wake up sweating and trembling in the night.

The next mention of the dream came in a report dated six days after Lemarre’s initial memo. The dream was identical in every respect. When Lemarre asked Jimmy what he thought of the fact that in the dream his mother had a penis, Jimmy answered, “Well, it’s a dream. Anything can happen in a dream.”

“Yes, but she has a penis, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you think of her as a particularly masculine person?”

“My mother? You got to be kidding.”

“Then why does she have a penis?”

“It’s a dream,” Jimmy answered.

At their next session, two days later, Lemarre asked Jimmy if it would be all right to tape-record what they talked about. Jimmy wanted to know why, and Lemarre said it would enable him to transcribe their sessions word for word later on, and study what was said, and perhaps reach some meaningful conclusions. Jimmy gave his permission. There followed in the file at least fifty closely spaced typewritten pages dealing exclusively with Jimmy’s exploration of the dream that continued to haunt him night after night. Janet lost interest after they’d waded through twenty pages of the transcript.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“I could use a cup.”

“I think I know where I can find some,” she said, and winked. “Did you plan on going back tonight?”

“What?” he said.

“To the city, I mean.”

“I guess so, yes.”

“Because with all this stuff,” she said, indicating the mountain of papers on the table, “we’re liable to be here all afternoon.”

“You know, I think I can manage the rest of it alone, if you—”

“No, no, I’m enjoying it,” she said. “Let me get the coffee, okay?”

“Sure. But seriously, if you want to go back upstairs…”

“I’m enjoying it,” she said, and her eyes met his, and he knew now that she
was
flirting and he didn’t know quite what to do about it.

“Well…sure,” he said. “Fine.”

“I’ll get the coffee,” she said.

“Fine.”

“And then later you can decide about going back to the city.”

“All right.”

She nodded. She turned then and went out through the door opposite the one they’d entered. He caught a brief glimpse of the corridor outside, the windows leaping with November sunlight. She closed the door behind her, and he listened to her heels clicking into the distance. He looked at his watch. The time was 3:10
P.M.
He turned back to the transcript.

Exploration upon exploration.

Is
the Christmas tree a Christmas tree? Is this
really
your father? Where does he cut himself when he falls? Are you sure your mother has a penis? Over and over again, the same questions and virtually the same answers until the nightmare took on nightmare proportions for Carella himself, making him as eager to be rid of it as had been Jimmy and Lemarre.

He looked at his watch again. It was almost 3:30, he wondered where Janet had gone for the coffee. He wondered what her last name was. Colonel Anderson had said only, “The sergeant will take you downstairs and give you a hand finding what you need.” Maybe the colonel had run into his sergeant in the hallway and demanded that she return upstairs to his office to resume her sergeantly duties.

Carella found it difficult to think of her as a sergeant. A sergeant was Sergeant Murchison who manned the muster desk at the Eight-Seven. A sergeant was any one of a dozen hairbags who rode in radio motor patrol cars checking on patrolmen. Janet What
ever
-Her-Name was not a sergeant, definitely not a sergeant. He really did find it extremely difficult to think of her that way. He wondered why he was thinking of her at
all
, in any way, shape or form. Then he wondered how the words “shape” and “form” had crept into his mind as regarded the sergeant, and he decided he’d been reading too many psychiatric reports and was beginning to examine with undue scrutiny his own id, ego or libido, as the case might be. He sighed and turned back to the file.

The first words he saw were “major breakthrough.” These were Lemarre’s words referring to a session that had occurred a month and a half before Jimmy was released from the hospital and simultaneously discharged from the Army. The major showed no appreciation of the fact that he had inadvertently used the word “major” to describe the breakthrough. Carella smiled, and wondered what Lemarre might have thought of Janet’s little joke about the
General
Hospital. There was Janet again, but
where
was Janet again? She had undoubtedly gone to Colombia for the coffee. He delayed reading about the major breakthrough; once he solved the mystery of Jimmy’s Christmas nightmare, he would have to climb into his car and start the long drive back to the city. He delayed, he delayed, he delayed for three minutes. When he began reading the word-for-word transcript, the time was 3:35.