Calypso (5 page)

    She looked at him.

    "The same questions," he repeated.

    "Ask your questions," she said, and folded her arms across her breasts.

    "All right," he said, and nodded. "At any time during the past few weeks did you notice anything strange about your husband's behavior?"

    "Strange how?" Chloe said. Her voice was still edged with anger, her arms were still folded defensively across her breasts.

    "Anything out of the ordinary, any breaks in his usual routine-I take it you knew most of his friends and business acquaintances."

    "Yes, I did."

    "Were there any such breaks in his usual routine?"

    "I don't think so."

    "Did your husband keep an appointment calendar?"

    "Yes."

    "Is it here in the apartment?"

    "In the bedroom. On the dresser."

    "Could I see it, Mrs. Chadderton?"

    "Yes," she said, and rose and left the room. Carella and Meyer waited. Somewhere outside, far below, a drainpipe dripped steadily and noisily. When Chloe came back into the room, she was carrying a black appointment book in her hand. She gave it to Carella, and he immediately opened it to the two facing pages for the month of September.

    "Today's the fifteenth," Meyer said.

    Carella nodded, and then began scanning the entries for the week beginning September eleventh. On Monday at 3:00 p.m., according to the entry scrawled in black ink in the square for that date, George Chadderton had gone for a haircut. On Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., he'd had lunch with someone identified only as Charlie. Carella looked up.

    "Who's Charlie?" he said.

    "Charlie?"

    " 'Lunch 12:30 p.m., Charlie,' " Carella read.

    "Oh. That's not a person, it's a place. Restaurant called Charlie down on Granada Street."

    "Have any idea who your husband had lunch with that day?"

    "No. He was always meeting with people, discussing gigs and contracts and like that."

    "Didn't Ambrose Harding handle all his business affairs?"

    "Yes, but George liked to meet who he'd be playing for, the promoter or the man who owned the hall or whoever."

    Carella nodded and looked down at the calendar again. There were no entries for Wednesday. For Thursday, the fourteenth, there were two entries: "Office, 11:00 a.m." and "Lunch 1:00 p.m. Harry Caine."

    "What would 'Office' be?" Carella asked.

    "Ame's office."

    "And who's Harry Caine?"

    "I don't know."

    Carella looked at the book again. For tonight, Friday, September fifteenth, Chadderton had written "Graham Palmer Hall, 8:30, Ame pickup 7:30." For tomorrow, Saturday the sixteenth, he had written "C. J. at C. C. 12 Noon."

    "Who's C. J.?" Carella asked, looking up.

    "I don't know," Chloe said.

    "How about C. C.? Does that mean anything to you?"

    "No."

    "Would it be a person or a place?"

    "I have no idea."

    "But you did know most of his friends and business acquaintances?"

    "Yes, I did."

    "Were there any recent conversations or meetings with strangers?"

    "Strangers?"

    "People you didn't know. Like this C. J., for example. Were there people whose names you didn't recognize when they phoned? Or people you saw him with, who-"

    "No, there was nobody like that."

    "Did anyone named C. J. ever phone here?"

    "No."

    "Did your husband mention that he had a meeting with this C. J. tomorrow at noon?"

    "No."

    "Mind if I take this with me?" Carella asked. "Why do you need it?"

    "I want to study it more closely, prepare a list of names, see if you can identify any of them for me. Would that be all right?"

    "Yes, fine."

    "I'll give you a receipt for the book."

    "Fine."

    "Mrs. Chadderton, when I spoke to Ambrose Harding earlier tonight, he mentioned that your husband's songs-
some
of his songs-dealt with situations and perhaps personalities here in Diamondback. Is that true?"

    "George wrote about anything that bothered him."

    "Would he have been associating lately with any of the people he wrote about? To gather material, or to-"

    "You don't have to do research to know what's happening in Diamondback," Chloe said. "All you need is eyes in your head."

    "When you say he
wrote
these songs-"

    "He wrote the songs down before he sang them. I know that's not what calypso
used
to be, people used to make them up right on the spot. But George wrote them all down beforehand."

    "The words
and
the music?"

    "Just the words. In calypso, the melody's almost always the same. There're a dozen melody lines they use over and again. It's the
words
that count."

    "Where did he write these words?"

    "What do you mean
where?
Here in the apartment."

    "No, I meant…"

    "Oh. In a notebook. A spiral notebook."

    "Do you have that notebook?"
''Yes,
it's in the bedroom, too."

    "Could I see it?"

    "I suppose so," she said, and rose wearily.

    "I wonder if I could look through his closet, too," Carella said.

    "What for?"

    "He was dressed distinctively tonight, the red pants and the yellow shirt. I was wondering…"

    "That was for the gig. He always dressed that way for a gig-"

    "Same outfit?"

    "No, different ones. But always colorful. He was singing calypso, he was trying to make people think of carnival time."

    "Could I see some of those other outfits?"

    "I still don't know why."

    "I'm trying to figure out whether anyone might have recognized him from the costume alone. It was raining very hard, you know, visibility…"

    "Well, nobody would've seen the costume. He was wearing a raincoat over it."

    "Even so. Would it be all right?"

    Chloe shrugged, and walked wordlessly out of the kitchen. The detectives followed her through the living room, and then into a bedroom furnished with a rumpled king-sized bed, a pair of night tables, a large mahogany dresser, and a standing floor lamp beside an easy chair. Chloe opened the top drawer of the dresser, rummaged among the handkerchiefs and socks there, and found a spiral notebook with a battered blue cover. She handed the book to Carella.

    "Thank you," he said, and immediately began leafing through the pages. There were penciled lyrics for what appeared to be a dozen or more songs. There were pages of doodles, apparently scrawled while Chadderton was awaiting inspiration. On one of the pages, doodled all across it in block lettering and script lettering alike, overlapping and crisscrossing, were the words "IN THE LIFE."

    "What's this?" Carella said, and showed the page to Chloe.

    "I don't know. Maybe a song title."

    "Did he sing anything called 'In the Life'?"

    "No, but maybe it's just the
idea
for a song, just the title."

    "Do you know what that expression means?" Carella asked.

    "Yes, I think so. It refers to criminals, doesn't it? People in… well, in the criminal life."

    "Yes," Carella said. "But your husband wasn't associating with any criminals, was he?"

    "Not to my knowledge."

    "None of the pushers or prostitutes he wrote about?"

    "Not to my knowledge."

    "That's a common expression among prostitutes," Carella said. "In the life." Chloe said nothing. "Is that the closet?" Carella asked.

    "Yes, right there," she said, gesturing with her head. Carella handed the spiral notebook to Meyer, and then opened the closet door. Chloe watched him as he began moving hangers and clothing. She watched him intently. He wondered if she realized he was not looking for any of the colorful costumes her husband had worn on his various gigs, but instead was looking for black boots, a black raincoat, and a black hat- preferably wet. "These are what he wore, huh?" he asked.

    "Yes. He had them made for him by a woman on St. Sab's."

    "Nice," Carella said. Chloe was still watching him. He shoved aside several of the garments on their hangers, looked deeper into the closet.

    "Mrs. Chadderton," Meyer said, "can you tell us whether your husband seemed worried or depressed lately? Were there any unexplained absences, did he seem to have any inkling at all that his life was in danger?"

    Searching the closet, hoping that his search appeared casual, Carella recognized that Meyer had buried his "unexplained absences" question in a heap of camouflaging debris, circling back to the matter of possible infidelity in a way that might not ruffle Chloe's already substantially ruffled feathers. In the closet, there were several coats, none of them black and none of them wet. On the floor, a row of women's high-heeled pumps, several pairs of men's shoes, some low-heeled women's walking shoes, and a pair of medium-heeled women's boots-tan. Chloe had still not answered Meyer's question. Her attention had focused on Carella again. "Mrs. Chadderton?" Meyer said.

    "No. He seemed the same as always," she said. "What are you looking for?" she asked Carella abruptly. "A gun?"

    "No, ma'm," Carella said. "You don't own a gun, do you?"

    "This has got to be some kind of comedy act," Chloe said, and stalked out of the bedroom. They followed her into the kitchen. She was standing by the refrigerator, weeping again.

    "I didn't kill him," she said.

    Neither of the detectives said anything.

    "If you're done here, I wish you'd leave," she said.

    "May I take the notebook with me?" Carella asked.

    "Take it. Just go."

    "I'll give you a receipt, ma'm, if you-"

    "I don't
need
a receipt," she said, and burst into fresh tears.

    "Ma'm…"

    "Would you please
go?"
she said. "Would you please get the hell out of here?" They left silently.

    In the hallway outside, Meyer said, "We were clumsy."

    "We were worse than that," Carella said.

    

    

    In the silence of the 3:00 a.m. squadroom, he sat alone at his desk and wondered what the hell was happening to him. He would have to call her in the morning, apologize to her, tell her it had been a long day and a longer night, tell her that sometimes in this business you began looking for murderers under every rock, explain-
shit
. He had treated a grieving widow like a goddamn assassin. There was no excuse. He was tired, but that was no excuse. He had listened to Monoghan and Monroe making jokes about death and dying, and he had been irritated by their banter, but that was no excuse, either. Nor was the rain an excuse. Nothing could excuse his having played cop with a woman who'd been feeling only intense grief over the death of her husband. He sometimes believed that if he stayed at this job long enough, he would forget entirely what it meant to feel anything at all.

    "This is your case," the manual advised, "stick with the investigation." Stick with it in the pouring rain where a man lay with his open skull seeping his brains onto the sidewalk, stick with it in a hospital room reeking of antiseptic, stick with it in a tenement apartment at two in the morning, the clock throwing minutes into the empty hours of the night while a woman wept tears for her man who was dead. Search her closet for the clothes the killer wore. Get her to talk about her husband's possible infidelities. Be a fucking cop.

    He should have gone home. The squadroom clock read ten minutes to three now. Technically, it was already Saturday morning, though it still felt like Friday night, and it was still raining. Technically, his tour had ended at midnight, and he'd have gone home then if the Chadderton squeal hadn't come in at a quarter to twelve, just when Parker and Willis were supposed to relieve. He was exhausted and irritable, and feeling hugely like a horse's ass for his handling of the Chadderton woman, feeling not a little self-pity besides, poor public servant forced to deal with the more violent side of life, low pay and long hours, lousy working conditions and departmental pressures for swift arrests and convictions-he should have gone home to bed. But the notebook was here on his desk, sitting with its frayed blue cover and its pages of lyrics written by the dead man, urging scrutiny. He rose, stretched, went to the water cooler, drank a paper cup full of water, and then went back to the desk. The clock on the wall read 3:05 a.m. The squadroom was silent, a poorly lighted mausoleum of empty desks and stilled typewriters. Beyond the slatted wooden railing that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside, he could see a light burning behind the frosted glass door to the locker room, and beyond that the banister post for the iron-runged steps that led to the muster room on the first floor of the building. Downstairs, a telephone rang. He heard a patrolman greeting another patrolman coming in off the street. Alone in the squadroom, Carella opened the notebook.

    He had never been to Trinidad, had never witnessed the monumental calypso contests that took place in the carnival tents at Port of Spain each year before Ash Wednesday. But as he leafed through the pages of the notebook now, the words scribbled in pencil seemed suddenly to pulse with the Afro-Spanish rhythms that had been their base, and he might have been there at Mardi Gras, swaying to the music that swelled from the corrugated-iron and palm-leaf tents, the men and women in the audience snapping their fingers and shouting the call-and-response, the performers ingeniously twisting their rhythms and rhymes, singing out their sarcasm, their protest, their indignation: