Long Time No See (16 page)

“They don’t pay as much as this one. The job here gave me plenty of money for myself, and enough to send Aunt Hess a little every now and then. Besides, I wanted a Benz.”

“A what?”

“A Mercedes-Benz. I wanted one for the longest time. So I answered an ad in one of the fuck-papers, and took the job. I’m paying off the car now, I bought it on time. I make a lot of money here. And I’m really good at it,” Stephanie said, and shrugged. “I give good blow jobs.”

“How often did you send money to your aunt?”

“Every now and then.”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars, a hundred. It depended.”

“Did anyone
know
she had this extra money coming in?”

“Why? Was she robbed? Did someone rob her?”

“No, it doesn’t look that way. But sometimes people get envious and—”

“It wasn’t that much money. I sent her whatever I could, but it wasn’t a fortune. Anyway, my aunt never told her business to anybody. I’m sure she wouldn’t have told anybody she was getting money from me.”

Again there was laughter down the hall. A girl’s laughter, high and genuine. Stephanie reached for a tissue in a box resting on the floor. She blew her nose, and tucked the tissue into the waistband of the skirted scarf covering the G-string. Then she looked at her watch.

“The last time you spoke to your aunt…” Carella said.

“Yeah,” Stephanie said, and nodded. “But could you please hurry it up, cause you paid for a half hour, you know, and they like us to keep track of the time.”

“Did she mention anything that was frightening her?”

“No.”

“Any threatening letters or phone calls?”

“No.”

“Anything that was worrying her, or troubling her…”

“Nothing,” Stephanie said.

“Nothing,” Carella repeated.

Driving back home to Riverhead, the faulty car heater clanking and rattling but doing little otherwise to defrost the windshield, he began adding up what he had. The tally came close to the nothing he had gotten from Stephanie Welles. He bunched his gloved fist, rubbed it against the rime forming on the glass, and cleared a spot about the size of a melon. He knew it would frost over again in no time at all, but meanwhile, he enjoyed the luxury of being able to see the road ahead. It was not yet 11:30, there wasn’t much traffic going out of the city this early on a Saturday night.

The case had begun on Thursday with the murder of Jimmy Harris, had lurched into Friday morning with the subsequent murder of Jimmy’s wife, and had zigged and zagged an essentially unrewarding path across the city and the state until it smashed into a dead-end brick wall with the murder of Hester Mathieson earlier tonight. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, three days, and the case was still as cold as a herring, red or otherwise.

Carella was tired and he was irritated and he was probably inconsolable, but he tried nonetheless to console himself with facts because he knew that in police work there
were
no mysteries; there were only crimes and the people who committed them. The people were sometimes professionals—as were armed robbers and burglars and some murderers. Or they were sometimes amateurs—as were
most
murderers. Or they were sometimes crazies—as were most pyros and some murderers and a mixed bag of other lawbreakers as unrelated as rapists or false-alarmists or muggers or parakeet-thieves or—

The facts, please.

Three blind people killed in as many days. Nothing stolen from any of them. Apartment of the first two victims turned inside out and upside down. Okay, the murderer was looking for something. What? Was it something Jimmy had buried? Dirt under his fingernails—soil,
soil.
So, yes, he had possibly buried something. Then why did the killer tear up the furniture and overturn the lamps and dump forks and knives all over the floor and generally behave badly? Because he didn’t
know
beforehand that Jimmy had
buried
whatever it was he was looking for. All right, then, did he
find
whatever Jimmy had buried? Yes, he found it. How do you know? Because he didn’t similarly ransack Hester Mathieson’s apartment. If he’d already found what Jimmy had buried, there was no need to search for it elsewhere. Good. In fact, brilliant. Then why did he bother to
kill
Hester Mathieson? If she had nothing he wanted, why did he kill her?

Problems, problems. There were always problems in the murder business. Carella had called Meyer the moment he’d got home from Fort Mercer, hoping to learn if Meyer had found any evidence of recent digging in the Harris apartment or in the backyard. He had his speech all prepared; he’d worked on it during the latter part of the tedious downstate drive. When Meyer got on the phone, he was going to say, “Well, did you dig up anything?” He was chuckling even as he dialed the familiar number, but he’d got no reply. Meyer was undoubtedly still at the wedding; it was not every day of the week that someone like Irwin the Vermin got married. Carella thought back to the day Irwin got bar mitzvahed. If memory served—and it did—that was the same day Cotton Hawes got transferred to the Eight-Seven. He could remember their first meeting in the lieutenant’s office, Hawes explaining that he’d been named after Cotton Mather the Puritan preacher, and immediately saying it could have been worse, he might have been named Increase. He’d taken him out into the squadroom and introduced him to Meyer, who was fretting about a liquor store murder that would surely cause him to miss Irwin’s—

The facts, please. Stick to the facts.

Three blind people dead in as many days. Nobody can remember anybody who had anything against Jimmy or Isabel or Hester. Nice people. Nice
blind
people, in fact, than which there are no people nicer. Except that Jimmy’s mother thought he was cooking up a crooked scheme like armed robbery or something with one of his old Army buddies, a likelihood Carella considered tantamount to discovering diamond mines on Mars—but who could tell? It’s a wise child who knows his own father, and it’s an even wiser mother who can spot a budding criminal in the little bugger she’d nursed and weaned. Hadn’t Jimmy, after all, once belonged to a street gang named the Hawks? He had indeed. This did not bespeak a lad who’d followed the straight and righteous all his livelong days, oh no. This bespoke a lad who’d bashed a few skulls in his time, and stomped a few ribs, and generally misbehaved as badly as the killer who’d torn up his apartment looking for something that may or may not have been buried, whatever the hell
that
might have been.

If it was buried in the apartment, it had to be small; there were no fields or pastures in a city apartment. There were backyards, of course, and maybe Jimmy had gone down there to do his digging,
if
he’d done any digging at all, at all. This information would have to wait on the call to Meyer tonight or tomorrow morning. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow crept in this petty pace, but it never got to be Sunday. It was still twenty minutes to Sunday, and God knew how many weeks or months to Monday. Carella had the feeling Monday would never again come.

So here was this nice blind person named Jimmy Harris, whose mother thought he was cooking up a larcenous scheme involving guns, and here was his sweet and innocent blind wife, Isabel, who was painting the town red or at least living it up a bit in this or that motel with her employer, who was madly in love with her and who planned to marry her. A pair of nice blind people, one of whom was
maybe
planning something criminal, the other of whom was already
doing
something criminal, adultery being a crime in the city for which Carella worked—a Class B misdemeanor, no less, punishable by at least three months in jail or a fine of $500.

He should have mentioned that to old Janet upstate there at Fort Mercer. He should have said, “Janet, do you know that there is a section of the Criminal Law titled ‘Adultery’ and defined as ‘engaging in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when one has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse’? Did you know that, Janet?” But then again, she hadn’t invited him to break the law, she had only invited him to dinner at a great little restaurant she knew. And besides, why was he thinking of her once again while driving back home yet another time?

Hester Mathieson was another nice blind person who only happened to have a hooker for a niece. Which wasn’t bad, of course, if you didn’t mind the fact that the money your niece sent you was dirty money. Hester couldn’t have minded because, first of all, she didn’t know her niece was in the life, and secondly, she didn’t know that the C-notes coming to her irregularly were earned in a profession that was presumably victimless but that supplied the boys in the mob with the cash for the pursuit of
other
victimless crimes like selling dope to teenagers. Arthur may not have realized it tonight, but the $60 he’d paid to old sloe-eyed Jasmine for his two hours of bliss with a prostitute went directly to the bad guys who were running the operation. And whereas Stephanie Welles, also known as Shana, hadn’t told Carella much, he knew for certain that a goodly portion of every nickel she received for those very good blow jobs she knew how to perform
also
went to the boys in the mob. The boys were
not
nice people, and whereas Carella could see no connection as yet between Shana’s occupation and the death of her aunt, he knew that where there was rat shit, you were bound and certain to find rats sooner or later.

So there they were, Jimmy and Isabel and Hester—three nice blinds, so to speak. Oh yes, they each and separately had a few skeletons hanging in the closet, but maybe this was meaningful and maybe it was not. And here was Carella, not knowing which way to turn next, knowing only that he had to handle this one the way he handled all the other ones. Dig for the facts, evaluate the facts—which he’d done already and which he had to admit left him exactly nowhere. And then dig for further facts, which you could then evaluate in the hope that they, too, would leave you exactly nowhere, in which case you could quit the force and become a street cleaner, or at least go home to sleep.

Carella yawned.

He bunched his fist again and wiped at the frosted windshield again, and then decided he would go to Diamondback in the morning to try to find out why Jimmy Harris’s nightmares had persisted long after the good Major Lemarre had exposed and explored and explained the trauma that had presumably caused them.

Carella was hoping against hope that it wouldn’t turn out to be the Eight-Three.

The Eight-Three was the precinct in which Fat Ollie Weeks worked.

Isola was divided into twenty-three precincts, and five of those were up in Diamondback. The Diamondback precincts were, for some reason known only to police commissioners past, numbered not in consecutive but in bi-consecutive order. First there was the Seven-Seven on the easternmost tip of the island, bordering Riverhead and taking in the area surrounding Devil’s Break. The Seven-Seven was considered a lucky precinct, but only because of the twin sevens and the allusion to the game of craps; actually, it had the highest crime rate in the entire city, higher even than the notorious 101st in West Riverhead. The 101st was called Custer’s Last Stand in honor of Detective-Lieutenant Martin Custer, who ran the squad up there. It was a curiosity of police jargon that the 87th, for example, was referred to as the “Eight-Seven,” and the 93rd was referred to as the “Nine-Three,” but the 101st was called the “Hundred and First” rather than the “One-oh-One.” Go figure it.

Moving right along, folks, the precinct west of the Seven-Seven was the Seven-Nine, bordering the River Harb and affording a fine view of the Hamilton Bridge from its squadroom windows—if you peeked through the peaks and minarets of a thousand-some-odd tenements between the station house and the river. The Eight-One was on the other side of the Diamondback River and ran southward all the way to Hall Avenue, where North Diamondback officially became South Diamondback—try to pay attention, Harold. The Eight-Three and the Eight-Five sat like a pair of nuns, one facing the river, the other facing Hall Avenue, in that part of Diamondback bearing such religious names as St. Anthony’s Avenue and Bishop’s Road and Temple Boulevard and Tabernacle Way. The Eight-Seven, somewhat less sacrosanct except to those who worshipped it, bordered both on its eastern end. On the 87th’s north was the river, on its south was Grover Park. End of geography lesson.

Fat Ollie Weeks was a detective in the Eight-Three. Carella did not like working with him. That was only because Ollie was a bigot. Carella did not like bigots. Ollie was a good cop and an excellent bigot. His bigotry extended to everyone and everything. He missed being a misanthrope by a hair. That was because there were some people he actually liked. One of those people was Steve Carella. Since the affection was somewhat less than mutual, Carella tried to avoid wandering into the Eight-Three except out of dire necessity. Carella even avoided
calling
the Eight-Three unless a hatchet murderer was last seen on the steps leading up to the station house there. His dislike of Fat Ollie bordered on ingratitude; the man had, after all, helped them crack at least two cases in recent memory.

Carella hoped it would not be the Eight-Three. On the telephone he asked Sophie Harris where she’d been living when her son Jimmy was eighteen, and then held his breath in anticipation of her answer. The telephone line crackled and spit. Sophie said she’d lived on Landis and Dinsley. Carella let out his breath and then thanked her more profusely than her simple answer seemed to have warranted. Landis and Dinsley was in the Eight-Five.

They went up there at 10:00 that Sunday morning. Meyer had a hangover, but he was able to report with some lucidity about what he’d discovered, or rather what he had
not
discovered, in the Harris apartment yesterday.

“The way I figure it,” he said, “something was buried in that window box, and somebody later dug it up.”

“Jimmy?”

“Maybe. Or maybe the killer, I packed a specimen of the dirt in an evidence—”

“Soil,” Carella said.

“What?”

“It’s soil, not dirt.”

“Yeah—in an evidence bag and sent it over to the lab. This was before I went to Irwin’s wedding, I want you to know. You had me very busy yesterday.”

“Did you check out the backyard?”

“I went down there before I left the building. I didn’t see any signs of digging.”

“How’d the window box look?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it dumped on the floor like the rest of the stuff in the apartment?”

“The dirt, you mean?”

“Yeah, the soil.”

“No, it was in the box.”

“Well, if the killer went throwing everything all over the place, why was he so neat with the window box?”

“Then maybe it wasn’t the killer,” Meyer said, and shrugged, and then winced. “My head hurts when I shrug,” he said. “I shouldn’t drink. I really shouldn’t drink. I can hold my liquor, I don’t get drunk, but I always have a terrible hangover the next day.”

“What do you drink?” Carella asked.

“Scotch. Why? What does it matter what I drink?”

“Some drinks give you worse hangovers than other drinks. Gin gives you terrible hangovers. So does bourbon. Cognac is the worst.”

“I drink scotch and I have a hangover,” Meyer said. “That’s because I’m Jewish.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Indians and Jews get terrible hangovers from drinking scotch,” Meyer said. “Jewish college girls get headaches from eating Chinese food, did you know that? It’s from the monosodium glutamate in it. It’s called the Jewish College Girl Syndrome.”

“How do you happen to know that amazing fact?” Carella asked.

“I looked it up.”

“Where?”

“In the library. Under ‘Jewish College Girls.’”

“I’ve never in my life looked under a Jewish college girl,” Carella said.

“The reason I looked it up, I was working on this case,” Meyer said, “where an Indian—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Carella said.

“God’s truth. An Indian was lacing a Jewish college girl’s Chinese food with scotch, and she was getting terrible headaches all the time. I finally arrested the Indian.”

“Did the headaches go away?”

“No, but the Indian did. For six years.”

“What did the girl do about the headaches?”

“She went to see a headache doctor. He told her she was wearing underwear a size too small.”

“How did he know?”

“He looked it up.”

“Under what?”

“Under
wear
,” Meyer said, and both men burst out laughing.

They were still laughing when they showed their shields to the patrolman stationed outside the front steps of the 85th Precinct. The patrolman looked at the shields and then looked at the two men. He suspected they were imposters, but he let them go inside, anyway; hell with it, let the desk sergeant’s mother worry. The building that housed the 85th looked very much like the one that housed the 87th—twin green globes flanking the entrance doors, wide steps leading up to those doors, muster room beyond, brass rail just before the muster desk, sergeant sitting behind the high wooden desk like a magistrate in a British court. They showed him their shields and said they wanted to talk to someone in the Detective Division.

“Anyone in particular?” the sergeant asked.

“Anyone who might be familiar with street-gang activity in the precinct.”

“That’d be Jonesy, I guess,” the sergeant said, and plugged a line into his switchboard. He waited, and then said, “Mike, is Jonesy up there? Put him on, will you?” He waited again. “Jonesy,” he said, “I’ve got a pair of detectives down here, want to talk to somebody about street gangs. Can you help them?” He listened, and then said, “Where you guys from?”

“The Eight-Seven,” Meyer said.

“The Eight-Seven,” the sergeant repeated into the phone. “Okay, fine,” he said, and pulled out the plug. “Go right upstairs,” he said, “he’s waiting for you. How’s Dave Murchison? He’s your desk sergeant there, ain’t he?”

“Yes, he is,” Carella said.

“Give him my regards. Tell him John Sweeney, from when we used to walk a beat together in Calm’s Point.”

“We’ll do that,” Meyer said.

“Ask him about the ham and eggs,” Sweeney said, and laughed.

The detectives of the 85th had somehow managed to wheedle from petty cash, or someplace, the money for a printed sign. It read
DETECTIVE DIVISION
in bold black letters. Just below the words was a pointing carnival-barker hand that looked like what someone’s great-grandmother might have seen. It gave the otherwise decrepit muster room a look of antiquity and shoddy dignity. Up the iron-runged steps they went, just as if they were home. Turn the corner, walk down the hall, there was the bull pen. No slatted-rail divider here. Instead, a bank of low filing cabinets that formed a sort of wall across the corridor. Just inside the battered metal barrier was a desk. A huge black man in shirtsleeves was standing behind the desk, a clearly anticipatory look on his face.

“I’m Jonesy,” he said. “Come in, have a seat.”

A plastic nameplate on his desk read
Det. Richard Jones.
The desktop was strewn with familiar DD report forms, departmental flyers and notices, hot car sheets, stop-sheets, all-state bulletins, B-sheets, mug shots, fingerprint cards—the usual clutter you’d find on the desk of any detective in the city. There were four men besides Jonesy in the squadroom. Two of them sat typing at their desks. One was leaning against the grilled detention cage, talking to a young black girl inside it. Another was at the water cooler, bending over to look at the spigot.

“Steve Carella,” Carella said, and took a chair alongside Jonesy’s desk. “This is my partner, Meyer Meyer.”

“What can I do for you?” Jonesy asked.

At the water cooler, the detective straightened up and said to no one in particular, “What the fuck’s wrong with this thing?” No one answered him. “I can’t get any water out of it,” he said.

“We’re looking for a line on a street gang named the Hawks.”

“Right,” Jonesy said.

“You know them?”

“They’re inactive. Used to be a bopping gang, oh, ten, fifteen years ago. Half of them got drafted, busted, or killed, the others went the drug route. Haven’t heard a peep from them in years.”

“How many members were there?”

“Maybe two dozen in the nucleus group, another fifty or so scattered throughout Diamondback. These gangs like to think of themselves as armies, you know what I mean? In fact, some of them
are
—four, five hundred members all over the city. Once the shit is on, it’s important how many guys they can put on the street. We had a fight three weeks ago, I swear to Christ this one gang put a thousand guys in the park. Gang called the Voyagers, I love those grand-sounding names, don’t you? Had it out with a Hispanic gang in Grover Park. The Eight-Nine put us onto it because the other gang is in their precinct. Gang named the Caballeros. What a bunch of bullshit,” Jonesy said.

“About the Hawks,” Carella said. “Would you be familiar with someone named Lloyd?”

“Lloyd what?”

“That’s all we’ve got. He would have been president of the gang twelve years ago.”

“My partner’d know more about that than me. He’s the one started this detail. We were getting so much gang activity in this precinct we had to create a special detail, would you believe it? Two men who should be taking care of people getting robbed or mugged, got to waste our time instead riding herd on a bunch of street hoodlums. Let’s take a look at the cards, see what we got on this Lloyd. I’m not sure they go back that far, but let’s see.”

They went back that far.

Whoever Jonesy’s partner was, he had done a fine job of compiling individual dossiers not only for members of the Hawks but for every other street-gang member in the precinct. The card on Lloyd Baxter was typical of a “leader’s” card. He had been a truant throughout his elementary, junior high, and high school career, finally dropping out the moment he could do so legally, at the age of sixteen, and getting busted six months later for Burglary Three, defined as “knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” The building was, naturally enough, a school. Lloyd Baxter smashed a window and went in there with the alleged intent to steal typewriters. He copped a plea for the lesser charge of Criminal Trespass Three, “knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in or upon premises,” a simple violation for which the punishment was three months and/or a fine of $250—just what a prostitute might have got. He was sentenced to three months in jail, and the sentence was suspended because he was a juvenile. Four months later, immediately after the probationary period ended, Lloyd Baxter was arrested for Assault Three. By that time he was sergeant at arms in the street gang known as the Hawks and the person he assaulted was a kid named Luis Sainz, who was president of a gang called Los Hermanos. Again Lloyd got off with a suspended sentence, probably because his victim was a punk like himself and the judge thought it foolish to pay for the care and feeding of hoodlums who might otherwise do away with each other if left to their own devices on their own turf. The week he beat the assault rap, Lloyd was elected president of the Hawks, a conquering hero returning home to ticker-tape parades and consequent droits du seigneur.

One of the prizes awarded to the newly elected leader was a girl named Roxanne Dumas, who sounded like either a stripper or a great-granddaughter of the late French novelist, neither of which she was. She was, instead, a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents had come from the lovely island of Jamaica, her forebears having been part English, part French, her nature amiable and benign until the city got hold of her.

It was some city, this city.

Roxanne was twelve when her parents moved from Jamaica into a section of the city inhabited almost exclusively by legal immigrants or illegal aliens from various Caribbean islands. And even though the mix was predominantly Jamaican, the neighborhood had been dubbed “Little Cruz Bay” by law-enforcement officers, later bastardized to “Little
Cruise
Bay” when it became a happy hunting ground for teenage prostitutes of island extraction—the white-collar white workers of this city being extremely tolerant when it came to a little
café au lait
on their lunch hours. Roxanne missed initiation into the oldest profession by a whisper; her parents moved from Little Cruise Bay to Diamondback when she was thirteen, into a neighborhood where tan was black and black was beautiful,
whatever
the nation of your origin. When Roxanne was fourteen, she began “going” with a boy of sixteen who was a member of the Hawks. She was fifteen when Lloyd Baxter assaulted the president of Los Hermanos to himself become president of the Hawks. Lloyd was seventeen at the time, an impudent age for a president; there were street-gang leaders who were in their late twenties, some of them married and with children of their own. Lloyd and Roxanne hit it off at once. Her former boyfriend, a kid named Henry, merely shined it on without a murmur; he was by then shooting twenty dollars’ worth of heroin a day and was well on his way to a career as a raging junkie. Henry died of an overdose two years later, shortly before the supposed Christmas trauma Jimmy Harris related to Major Lemarre during his stay at Fort Mercer.