Long Time No See (11 page)

In where?

HARRIS:

On the corner, there. Full of weeds. They throw her there.

LEMARRE:

Then what?

HARRIS:

Ain’t no…ain’t no…shit, ain’t no way to…

LEMARRE:

All right, Jimmy.

HARRIS:

What
I’m
cryin for?
I
didn’t hurt her,
I
didn’t do nothing to her.

LEMARRE:

It’s all right, Jimmy. You can cry.

HARRIS:

Why God take
my
eyes, man? Was the other four hurt her. Why God punish me?

LEMARRE:

Jimmy, what happened a long time ago has nothing to do with your getting blinded.

HARRIS:

It got
everything
to do with it, man.

That was the end of the session and the end of the transcript. Dr. Lemarre’s notes indicated that at this point Jimmy Harris broke down and began sobbing uncontrollably for the next half hour. The doctor finally had him taken to the ward and sedated.

At their next session Jimmy refused to discuss the incident again, or to name the members of the gang who had held Lloyd against the basement post, and later raped Roxanne. It was the doctor’s opinion that the horror of the day—the irreversible set of circumstances that Jimmy had been unable to control or stop—was causing him to dream over and again of his father being killed. Lemarre couldn’t quite understand why, in the nightmare, Roxanne had become Lloyd’s father. He suspected that this was the reason a penis was attributed to the dream-mother: an attempt of the unconscious to explain the symbolism, a not unusual occurrence. But in addition, the unconscious mind was trying to tell Jimmy something else as well. It was saying, rather blatantly, that the symbolic death was in reality a rape. The woman in the dream had a penis under her skirt; in the actual event, there had indeed been penises under Roxanne’s skirt. When Lemarre asked Jimmy what had happened to Roxanne
after
the boys carried her to the lot, Jimmy said he didn’t know.

Did someone find her there?

I don’t know. She just disappeared, man.

You never saw her again?

Never.

What happened to Lloyd?

We kicked him off the club and got ourselves a new president.

“So that’s it, huh?” Janet said.

“I guess so.”

“That explains it all, huh?”

“Mm,” Carella said. He sounded very dubious.

“And now you’ve got what you came up here for.”

“I suppose.”

“Does it help you?”

“No.”

“Total loss, huh?” Janet said.

“I guess.”

“So why don’t you take me to dinner?”

Carella looked at her.

“I’m off duty at four,” she said. “You can come back to the apartment with me, and have a drink while I change. Then we can have an early dinner, and…
quien sabe
? That’s Spanish,” she said, and grinned. “What do you say?”

“I say I’m married.”

“So am I, but my husband’s in Japan at the moment. And your wife’s back there in the city, which means we’re here together all by our lonesomes. So what do you say?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You could, you could,” she said, and grinned again. “Just give it a try.”

“Even if I tried.”

“I know a great little restaurant near the hospital, candlelight and wine, violins and gypsy music, romantic as hell. Don’t you yearn for a little romance in your life? Jesus, I yearn for a little romance in mine. Let me go home and put on a red dress and then we’ll—”

“Janet, I can’t.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Janet…”

“No, that’s okay, really.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Come on, really, it’s okay.”

He thought of her on the long drive back to the city.

According to a magazine survey he’d recently read, 50 percent of all American women between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were currently involved in extramarital affairs. That was a whopping huge percentage, considering the fact that back when Kinsey did his survey, the figure was only 38 percent. He did not know whether the figure applied by extension to the women of France, Germany, and Italy, belonging as they all did to the Common Market, but he suspected in his heart of Dickensian hearts that it certainly did
not
apply to the ladies of the British Empire—never, no
never.
In any event, and on any given day of the week, one out of two American women either were on their way to some gentleman’s bed or else had just come from some gentleman’s bed, the fellow in question not being related by marriage to the peripatetic lady. If one could reasonably assume, in the absence of any supportive slick-magazine evidence, that 50 percent of all
men
between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were similarly occupied, then 50 percent of the whole damn country was fooling around with somebody who wasn’t his wife or her husband or vice versa as the case might be.

The thought was staggering.

What made it even more staggering was the fact that a percentage-woman who
was
fooling around had chanced upon a percentage-man who
wasn’t
fooling around. Such odds, Carella surmised, were insurmountable—so to speak. But there they’d been, Sergeant Janet Somebody and Detective Steve Carella, in a room that reminded him of a monastery cell, heads bent as if in prayer, knees touching, and damned if he hadn’t behaved like a man who’d sworn vows of celibacy and near-silence. “Sorry, Janet,” mumble, mumble, “really awfully sorry,” mumble, finger the beads, say the vespers, drive back to the city wondering what had been missed beneath that olive-drab skirt, wondering what her lips, her breasts—

Cut it out, Carella thought.

He turned his mind instead to Lemarre’s report, and found the doctor’s conclusions as frustrating as had been the brief encounter with Janet. As a working cop, Carella would have felt compelled to examine more closely the criminal aspects of Jimmy’s traumatic memory, but perhaps psychiatrists didn’t work that way, perhaps they were only mildly curious about a bleeding rape victim dropped in an empty lot—

Did someone find her there?

I don’t know. She just disappear, man.

You never saw her again?

Never.

And that had been that, except for the incidental information that Lloyd had later been replaced by a new president. The basement rape would have happened twelve years ago, when Jimmy was eighteen. Simple enough to check with Sophie Harris to learn where they were living at the time, then check with the precinct, whichever precinct it was, for whatever they had on a street gang named the Hawks, a deposed president named Lloyd, and a rape victim named Roxanne. He’d do that when he got back to the city. Yes, he’d have to do that. Maybe Lemarre had cared only about getting to the root of the nightmares—if indeed he’d done that—but Carella was interested in knowing whether the perpetrators of a Class B felony had ever been apprehended.

He kept his foot on the accelerator, maintaining a steady sixty miles an hour, the limit on the thruway. At 4:45 he was still forty miles from the city, and it was beginning to get dark.

The woman who tapped her way along the sidewalk had lived in a world of darkness from the moment she was born. She was sixty-three years old, and lived alone in a building just off Delaware. Two dozen porn movie theaters and as many massage parlors were crowded into the square half mile that defined her neighborhood. The flesh castles were storefront operations, sidewalk plateglass windows painted out black or bilious green, hand-lettered signs advertising complete satisfaction at ten bucks a throw, N
O
R
IP
-O
FFS
. The skin-flick houses showed movies that never made it to the posher dream palaces on the city’s South Side, where ladies shopping for the afternoon stopped to rest their weary feet and simultaneously tickle their fancies with films artfully photographed and calculated to arouse.

The woman wore an accordion around her neck. She made her living playing the accordion. She did not think of herself as a beggar, and perhaps she wasn’t. She was a blind musician. She played on street corners, played tunes by ear on the instrument that had belonged to her father before his death. He had died forty years ago, when she was twenty-three. She had begun taking care of herself then, and was proud of the fact that she was able to manage. She did not know that the neighborhood in which she lived had become a cesspool over the past four years.

Each morning she said hello in passing to the tailor on the corner of Delaware and Pierce, and he returned her greeting while two doors down men entered a place called Heavenly Bodies, and across the street a theater marquee advertised a movie titled
Upside Down Cake.
She knew that drunks sprawled in doorways on the route from her building to the subway, but this was the city and drunks were expected, drunks had always been there. She did most of her shopping at the big supermarket four blocks from the apartment, and did not know that it was flanked by a pair of massage parlors respectively if not respectfully called The Joint and The Body Shop. Once a hawker for one of the rub-down emporiums handed her a leaflet upon which was depicted a flash of naked young ladies and a pate of bald-headed men enjoying communal saunas and whirlpools and whatnots. The leaflet was wasted on the woman with the accordion. Her sightless world was serene; she truly saw no evil. But behind her, as she threw the leaflet away, she heard laughter dark and mysterious.

Moving along the sidewalk now, her long white cane extended and undulating as though blown by a gentle breeze, right to left, back again, touching the sidewalk, touching the air, she turned the corner onto Pierce and began walking toward her building in the middle of the block. The tailor shop was closed; it closed at 6:00 and it was now 7:30. She ran her cane along the wrought-iron railing that defined the basement area of the brownstone north of the tailor shop, here now came the open space where the steps led down to where the garbage cans were stacked, she could smell them on the cold November air, there the post on the other side of the steps, and now the front stoop of the building, and the railing on the other side, abruptly turning back in a right angle toward the brick face of the big apartment building two doors down from her own building.

She wondered how much money she had earned today. It was difficult to play once the cold weather set in. She wore woolen gloves with the fingers cut off at the knuckle joints, and though she tried to keep her fingers moving constantly, they invariably got stiff and she was forced to stop playing and put them into the pockets of her black cloth coat until they were warm again. She wore a long muffler, purple the shopgirl had told her, people were so kind. Here now the garbage cans outside 1142 Pierce, super of the building never took them in till midnight, probably sitting in his basement room drunk as a coot, remembered to take in the cans only when it was almost time to put them
out
again, stunk up the whole neighborhood.

She wouldn’t mind a little nip herself just now, nothing like a little nip when there was a little nip in the air. Smiling at her own pun, she entered her building and felt along the wall for the third mailbox in the row, which was her box and which she always checked, even though the last time she’d received a letter from anyone but her niece was from the city advising her that she was being called for jury duty. The tailor had read it to her, and she had burst out laughing when he finished. She wrote back on her typewriter, telling the commissioner of jurors that she would be delighted to serve since she was as blind as justice, but that unfortunately she had to get out on the street every day to earn a living. The commissioner of jurors did not answer her letter, but neither did she report for duty, and nobody ever bothered her again.

She took the small mailbox key from her handbag now, and felt for the keyway on the box, and inserted the key—the lock had been broken and fixed again seventeen times since she lived in this building, and was now, thank God, in a state of good repair—and unlocked the box and felt inside it. Nothing. No surprises anymore. She could hardly remember the last time she’d been surprised. Well, yes, she
could
remember; it had been on her sixtieth birthday when Jerry Epstein across the hall gave her a party. Invited everybody in the building and also the tailor up the street, whose name she learned was Athanasios Parasekvopoulos, but she still referred to him as the tailor because she simply could not pronounce his name, not even in her mind. That had been a marvelous surprise, that party, with plenty of good food and whiskey—she really
did
need a little nip, she was chilled to the bone. But that was the last surprise she could remember. It was sort of sad, she guessed. She guessed there wasn’t much joy in life if there weren’t any surprises.

She put the mailbox key back into her purse, and the purse back into her handbag, and then she opened the lobby door and walked without needing the cane to where the inside steps began, taking the banister in her left hand, holding the cane in her right, the accordion heavy around her neck. She would be glad to take it off, pour herself a glass of whiskey, sit down to count the money. Someone had put a folded bill into the cup, she didn’t know what denomination it was, she’d have to ask Jerry later tonight, if he was home. Or else ask at the tailor shop in the morning. No, he’d be closed on Sunday. Her hand glided along the banister.