Long Time No See (19 page)

Monday morning came at last.

The telephone on Carella’s desk was ringing. He picked up the receiver and said, “87th Squad, Carella.”

“This is Maloney, Canine Unit.”

“Yes, Maloney.”

“You were supposed to call me,” Maloney said.

“I just got here this minute,” Carella said, and looked up at the clock. “It’s only a quarter to nine, Maloney.”

“I told you to call first thing in the morning.”

“This
is
first thing in the morning,” Carella said.

“I don’t want to get in no argument about whether it’s first thing in the morning,” Maloney said. “I been here since eight o’clock,
that’s
first thing in the morning, I don’t want to get in no argument. All I want to know is what disposition is to be taken with this dog here.”

“Yeah,” Carella said.

“What does
that
mean, yeah?”

“It means, give me a minute, okay?”

“This dog is not a nice dog here,” Maloney said. “He won’t let nobody go near him. He won’t eat nothin’ we put in his dish, he’s a fuckin’ ungrateful mutt, you want to know.”

“That’s how he was trained,” Carella said.

“To be ungrateful?”

“No, no. To take food only from his master. He’s a seeing-eye dog.”

“I know what he is. We don’t need no seeing-eye dogs down here. Down here, we need dogs who sniff out dope, that’s what we need down here. So what do you want me to do with him? You don’t want him, he goes to the shelter. You know what they do at the shelter?”

“I know what they do.”

“They keep the mutt three weeks, then they put him away. It’s painless. They put him in a container, they draw all the air out of it. It’s like going to sleep. What do you say, Coppola?”

“Carella.”

“Yeah, what do you say?”

“I’ll send someone down for him.”

“When?”

“Right away.”

“When is right away?”

“Right away is right away,” Carella said.

“Sure,” Maloney said. “The same way first thing in the morning is quarter to nine, right?”

“I’ll have somebody there by ten o’clock.”

“It’s the Headquarters building, eighth floor. Tell him to ask for Detective Maloney. What do you guys do up there, work half a day?”

“Only when we’re busy,” Carella said, and hung up. Detective Richard Genero was at his desk, studying his dictionary. Carella walked over to him and said, “What’s the good word, Genero?”

“What?” Genero said. “Oh,” he said, “I get it. The good word.”

He did not smile. He rarely smiled. Carella imagined he was constipated a lot. He wondered suddenly why no one on the squad called Genero “Richard” or “Richie” or “Dick” or anything but “Genero.” Everyone else on the squad called everyone else by his first name. But Genero was Genero. Moreover, he wondered why
Genero
had never noticed this. Was it possible that people outside the squadroom also called him Genero? Was it possible that his
mother
called him Genero? Did she phone him on Fridays and say, “Genero, this is Mama. How come you never call?”

“How would you like to do me a favor?” Carella said.

“What favor?” Genero asked suspiciously.

“How would you like to go downtown to pick up a dog?”

“What dog?” Genero asked suspiciously.

“A seeing-eye dog.”

“This is a gag, right?”

“No.”

“Then what dog?”

“I told you. A seeing-eye dog down at Canine.”

“This is a gag about when I got shot in the foot that time, right?”

“No, no.”

“When I was on that stakeout in the park, right?”

“No, Genero, wrong.”

“When I was making believe I was a blind man, and I got shot in the foot, am I right?”

“No. This is a real job. There’s a black Labrador that has to be picked up at Canine.”

“So why are you sending me?”

“I’m not
sending
you, Genero, I’m
asking
if you’d like to go.”

“Send a patrolman,” Genero said. “What the hell is this? Every time there’s a shit job to be done on this squad, I’m the one who gets sent. Fuck that,” Genero said.

“I thought you might like some air,” Carella said.

“I’ve got cases to take care of here,” Genero said. “You think I’ve got nothing to do here?”

“Forget it,” Carella said.

“Send a goddamn patrolman.”

“I’ll send a patrolman,” Carella said.

“Anyway, it’s a gag, you think I don’t know it?” Genero said. “You’re making fun of that time I got shot in the park.”

“I thought you got shot in the foot.”

“In the foot in the park,” Genero said unsmilingly. Carella went back to his own desk and dialed 24 for the muster room downstairs. When Sergeant Murchison picked up, he said, “Dave, this is Steve. Can you send a car to the Headquarters building for me? Eighth floor, ask for Detective Maloney, he’ll turn over a black Labrador retriever.”

“Is the dog vicious?” Murchison asked.

“No, he’s a seeing-eye dog, he’s not vicious.”

“There are some seeing-eye dogs will bite you soon as look at you,” Murchison said.

“In that case, tell your man to use a muzzle. They carry muzzles in the cars, don’t they?”

“Yeah, but it’s hard to get a muzzle on a vicious dog.”

“This dog isn’t vicious,” Carella said. “And, Dave, could you send somebody right away? If the dog isn’t picked up by ten, they’ll send him to the shelter and they’ll kill him in three weeks.”

“So what’s the hurry?” Murchison said, and hung up.

Carella blinked. He put the receiver back on the cradle and looked at it. He looked at it so hard that it rang, startling him. He picked up the receiver again.

“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.

“Steve, this is Sam Grossman.”

“Hello, Sam, how are you?”

“
Comme ci, comme ça
,” Grossman said. “Was it you who sent this soil sample to the lab? It’s only marked ‘87th Squad.’”

“Meyer did. How does it look?”

“It matches what we got from under Harris’s fingernails, if that’s what you’re looking for. But I’ve got to tell you, Steve, this is a fairly common composition. I wouldn’t consider this a positive make unless you’ve got corroborating evidence.”

“Corroborating supposition, let’s say.”

“Okay, then.”

“Anything on the Harris apartment?”

“Nothing. No alien latents, footprints, hairs, or fibers. Nothing.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll talk to you.”

“So long,” Grossman said, and hung up.

Carella put the receiver back on its cradle. An Army corporal was standing just outside the slatted-rail divider, looking tentatively into the squadroom. Carella got up and walked to the divider. “Help you?” he said.

“Sergeant downstairs told me to come up here,” the corporal said. “I’m looking for somebody named Capella.”

“Carella, that’s me.”

“This is from Captain McCormick,” the corporal said, and handed Carella a manila envelope printed in the left-hand corner with the words
U.S. Army, Criminal Investigations Division.

“You’re here early,” Carella said.

“Actually, we got the packet yesterday, but there was nobody in the office. Mailroom clocked it in at four-oh-seven
P.M.
Guys in St. Louis must’ve put it on a plane late Saturday night. That’s pretty good time, don’t you think?”

“That’s very good,” Carella said. “Thanks a lot.”

“Don’t mention it,” the corporal said. “How do I get to Reuter Street? I’ve got to make a pickup on Reuter Street, the recruiting office there.”

“That’s all the way downtown,” Carella said. “Are you driving?”

“Yeah.”

“When you come out of the station house, make a right, and then another right at the next corner. That’s a one-way street heading north, it’ll take you straight to the River Highway. You want the westbound entrance. Take the highway downtown till you see the sign for Reuter.”

“Thanks,” the corporal said.

“Thank
you
,” Carella said, and gestured with the manila envelope.

“Don’t mention it,” the corporal said again, and did a smart about-face and went down the corridor.

Carella carried the envelope back to his desk and opened it. The sheaf of papers was thin but unfamiliar. It took him a while to get used to the forms themselves, and then another while to digest the information they contained. He made notes as he went along, not knowing whether the Xeroxed papers were his to keep and not wanting to mark them. McCormick had seemed specific about protocol on the telephone Friday. He guessed he would have to return the papers to the captain when he was through with them.

James Randolph Harris had entered the Army on the seventeenth day of May, ten years ago. He was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for his basic training, and from there, to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for advanced infantry training. At the end of August he was sent overseas as a private first class in D Company, 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry, 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. It did not say so in his field file, but Carella knew from the photograph they’d found in the Harris apartment that Jimmy had been in the 2nd Squad’s Alpha Fire Team.

If Carella recalled his own Army days correctly, there were four platoons in a company, and four squads in a platoon, which meant that in D Company there were sixteen squads altogether. Each platoon had a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Squad, Army squads being labeled numerically rather than alphabetically. Since there were four platoons, there had to be four 2nd Squads. But there was nothing in the folder that gave the number of Jimmy’s platoon. Carella was assuming that if Jimmy had contacted an old Army buddy for assistance with a scheme, it would have been a man in his immediate combat team. But in order to zero in on Alpha, he had to know the number of the platoon.

The file dutifully reported that Jimmy had been wounded in action on the fourteenth day of December and then went on to describe the nature of the wound in strictly medical language. At the end of December he was transferred from the camp hospital to a hospital in Honolulu, and from there, to another hospital in San Francisco, and finally to the General Hospital at Fort Mercer. His DD Form-214 showed that he had been honorably discharged with full disability pension in March. That was all.

Carella needed more.

Sighing, he opened his personal telephone directory, and leafed through the LPs till he came to the listing for U.S. Army. Under that he found the number he had called at Fort Jefferson the other day, and below that, the number for the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. He looked up at the wall clock. It was twenty after 9:00, which meant that it was only twenty after 8:00 in St. Louis; there were sometimes drawbacks to living in a huge sprawling nation. He jotted the number onto a piece of scrap paper, and then took three DD report forms from his top desk drawer, separated them with two sheets of carbon, and began typing up his report on the interviews with Lloyd Baxter and Roxanne Hardy.

As he typed he wondered what Major Lemarre might have thought about Roxanne’s revelation. The major had seemed so certain that Jimmy was telling the truth about that basement rape twelve years ago. Instead, it hadn’t been a rape at all. Not a hundred-dollar gold-plated rape, nor even a two-bit tissue-paper rape. It had, instead, been a pair of teenage kids with the hots for each other, enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company against a basement post—listen, there were worse ways. The thing Carella didn’t understand was why Jimmy had lied. And why hadn’t the major caught the lie? Surely a trained psychiatrist should have been able to see through the false memory. There was no question but that Roxanne had told the truth about what happened that day; her retelling of the story had been too intense. But then again, so had Jimmy’s version—and it was Jimmy who’d been having the nightmares.

Carella was frankly puzzled. There hardly seemed anything of nightmare proportions in the sex Jimmy and Roxanne had shared that day, unless it was fear of punishment. Perhaps Jimmy was tortured by the idea of getting caught. Running the gauntlet was never any fun, even back in medieval times, and the modern street-gang version was no improvement on the original. Jimmy probably worried like hell about what had happened that day with Lloyd’s woman. He must have been familiar with gauntlet runs, must have visualized himself in the victim’s position—lead pipes crashing on his skull, tire chains flailing his chest, booted feet stomping him into the ground.

Thoughts like that could give a man nightmares, sure enough. Must have walked the streets expecting Lloyd’s hand to fall on his shoulder at any moment—
Hello, Jimmy, baby, I hear you done my woman.
Jimmy must’ve had his defense all prepared, must’ve concocted a rape story to rival that of the Sabine Sisters—
No, Lloyd, you got it all wrong, man. I didn’t do her, it was the
other
guys. I’m the one tried to stop them, in fact.
It wasn’t the truth he’d spilled out to Major Lemarre, it was his
defense.
He must’ve thought he was caught at last, the way Lemarre kept circling that nightmare, coming back to it over and over again, getting closer and closer to that rainy day in the basement. So he’d dragged out the rape.
This is what
really
happened, Doc. This is what
really
happened, Lloyd. Let the other guys run the gauntlet. I’m the good guy, I tried to stop them.

Well, maybe, Carella thought, and looked at the clock again. It was time to call St. Louis. He dialed the area code and then the number and listened to the phone ringing on the other end. He wondered what St. Louis was like. He had never been to St. Louis. He visualized cowboys running cattle through the streets. He visualized tough guys drinking rotgut in saloons or dancing with girls wearing net stockings and red garters.

“National Personnel,” a woman’s voice said.