Long Time No See (5 page)

“Yes, I’ll do that.”

“And would you ask them to send the file directly to me?”

“They’ll start quoting the Freedom of Information Act.”

“That wouldn’t be in conflict with the act.”

“They like to go through channels. My guess is I’ll have the file on Monday, if I put enough pressure on them. My further guess is you’ll have to come all the way out to Calm’s Point to get it. Unless I can find some sergeant who’s heading into the city.”

“Please do your best.”

“I’ll try.”

“Thanks,” Carella said, and hung up.

It was a few minutes past 5:00 on the wall clock. At the other end of the room, Genero began typing again. Hawes rose abruptly from his desk, said to his prisoner, “Okay, pal, let’s go,” and led him across the squadroom to the fingerprinting table. Behind the lieutenant’s closed door, a telephone rang. It rang again, and then was silent. Carella reached into the bottom drawer of his desk where he kept the telephone directories for all five sections of the city. He opened the one for Isola, turned to the P’s, and ran his finger down the page till he came to a listing for Prestige Novelty. He dialed the number at once.

“Prestige Novelty,” a woman’s voice said.

“This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad,” he said. “I’d like to speak to the owner of the company, please.”

“I think Mr. Preston may be gone for the day,” the woman said.

“Would you check, please?”

“Yes, sir.” There was a click on the line. He waited. While he waited he speculated that half his time as a working cop was spent on the telephone; the other half was spent typing up reports in triplicate. He was thinking of taking up cigar smoking.

“Hello?” the woman said.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Preston
has
gone already.”

“Can you give me his home number, please?”

“I’m sorry, sir, we’re not permitted to give out—”

“This is a homicide investigation,” Carella said.

“Sir, I’m sorry, I still can’t take it upon myself—”

“Let me speak to whoever’s in charge there right now,” Carella said.

“Well, there’s only me and Miss Houlihan. I was just getting ready to leave, in fact, when—”

“Let me talk to Miss Houlihan,” Carella said.

“Yes, sir, but she won’t give you his number, either,” the woman said. There was another click. Carella waited. His father smoked cigars. His father had smoked cigars for as long as he could—

“Miss Houlihan,” a voice said. A nasal, no-nonsense voice. “Can I help you?”

“This is Detective Carella of the—”

“Yes, Mr. Carella. I understand you want Mr. Preston’s home number.”

“That’s right.”

“We are not permitted—”

“Miss Houlihan, what is your position with Prestige Novelty?”

“I’m the bookkeeper.”

“Miss Houlihan, we’re investigating a pair of murders here.”

“Yes, I understand. But—”

“One of the victims worked for Prestige Novelty.”

“Yes, that would be Isabel Harris.”

“That’s right.”

“We know.”

“I need Mr. Preston’s telephone number.”

“I understand that,” Miss Houlihan said. “But you see, Mr. Carella, we’re not permitted to give out the private telephone numbers of company personnel.”

“Miss Houlihan, if I have to go all the way downtown to get a warrant forcing you to divulge a telephone number—”

“We were just about to close for the weekend when you called,” Miss Houlihan said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if you went for your warrant, there’d be no one here till Monday, anyway. And by that time you could just as easily call Mr. Preston at
this
number.”

“This can’t wait till Monday.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

“Miss Houlihan, are you familiar with Section 195.10 of the Penal Law?”

“No, I’m not”

“It’s titled
Refusing to Aid a Peace Officer.
I’m a peace officer, Miss Houlihan, and you’re refusing to aid me.” He was telling only the partial truth. The Class B misdemeanor was defined this way: “Upon command by a peace officer identifiable or identified to one as such, unreasonably failing or refusing to aid such peace officer in effecting an arrest or in preventing the commission by another person of any offense.”

Miss Houlihan was silent for an inordinately long time.

“Why don’t you just look it up in the phone book?” she said at last.

“Where does he live?”

“Riverhead.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Frank.”

“Thank you,” Carella said, and hung up. He pulled the Riverhead directory out of his drawer, opened it to the P’s, and ran his finger down the forty or so Prestons listed. There was a Frank Preston on South Edgeheath Road. Carella looked up at the clock and dialed the number.

The number rang five times before a woman picked it up.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Preston?”

“Who’s this, please?”

“Detective Carella of the 87th Squad.”

“Who?”

“Detective Carella of the—”

“Is this the police?”

“Yes,” Carella said.

“He’s not home yet.”

“Who am I speaking to, please?” Carella asked.

“His wife.”

“Mrs. Preston, what time do you expect him?”

“He’s usually home by six on Fridays. Is this about the blind girl?”

“Yes.”

“What a shame.”

“Yes. Mrs. Preston, would you tell your husband I’ll try to reach him again later tonight?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you,” Carella said, and put the receiver back onto the cradle.

Meyer was on the telephone at his own desk, talking to Sophie Harris, Jimmy’s mother. “We’ll be up there in about half an hour, does that sound all right?” he said, and nodded. “We’ll see you then.” He hung up, turned in the swivel chair. “You feel up to it?” he asked Carella.

“Yes, sure,” Carella said.

“She was bawling like a baby on the phone. Just got back from identifying both bodies. What’d you get from the Army?”

“Not much. I just placed a call to the man Isabel worked for, Frank Preston’s his name. I’ll try him again later, see what he can tell us. They’re both kind of blanks so far, aren’t they?”

“Jimmy and Isabel, do you mean?”

“Yeah. We don’t really know who they
were
, do we?”

“Not yet,” Meyer said. “Let’s go talk to Mama.”

The tempo of the city was changing.

From the dreary four/four of the workaday week, it was moving into a swifter beat, a quarter note played with the speed of an eighth, a sixteenth flashing by like a thirty-second—this was Friday night and the weekend was ahead. On the island of Isola, uptown and down, the citizens poured out of subway kiosks, heading for hot baths and fresh threads. In Riverhead, Calm’s Point, and Majesta, the public transportation system was mostly aboveground, the elevated structures winding above the city streets with all the grace of poor planning, steel supporting pillars embedded in concrete that was wedded to cobblestones that went back to the turn of the century. The elevated tracks and elevated platforms created a landscape of eternal shade below. The graffiti-sprayed subway cars came up out of their underground tunnels and clattered along the tracks toward distant destinations; to someone who lived at the other end of Riverhead, the farthest station stop in Calm’s Point was a two-hour-and-ten-minute ride away. You could get to Paris on the Concorde in just a little while longer. Here in Diamondback, the tracks were underground, and the only ugliness to be seen was in the tenements that lined the avenues and streets.

Diamondback was black, and black is beautiful—but Diamondback wasn’t. The blacks coming up out of those subway kiosks worked in a variety of jobs during the day, most of them menial. Many of the women cleaned house for other women, soaping fine china and polishing heavy sterling, dusting furniture bought abroad in French and English antique shops, hanging custom-designed dresses in closets where sables and minks nuzzled side by side, rinsing out crystal champagne glasses, and putting into the garbage outside the kitchen door empty magnum bottles with labels they could not pronounce. Some of the men worked in the kitchens of restaurants, washing dishes or sweeping floors, fetching or carrying while in the dining rooms out front the patrons ordered pâté de foie gras or filet mignon
a la béarnaise.
Some of the men were responsible for keeping the garment industry going, pushing racks of clothes from dress house to dress house in the teeming area below Kerry Cross, weaving in and out of traffic with the skill of toreadors dodging bulls. The cabs they avoided and eluded as they pushed their wheeled wardrobes were largely driven by black men like themselves, who carried wealthy passengers to luxurious apartment buildings on terraces overlooking the River Dix, where black women worked washing fine china and polishing heavy sterling, the cycle repeating itself ad infinitum.

The building in which Sophie Harris lived was a far cry from the river-view apartments on the city’s South Side, an even farther cry from the cloistered private homes in Smoke Rise, hugging the city’s other shore. There was no doorman here; there was not even a door. Someone had removed it from its hinges, leaving only the gaping jamb, beyond which was an entrance alcove. The alcove was a five-by-eight cubicle with a row of mailboxes on its left. They found a nameplate for Sophie Harris, pressed the bell under her name, and went to the inner-lobby door, which was still there though badly scarred with names in hearts. They did not expect an answering buzz, and got none. In Diamondback, the locks on most lobby doors had been broken when there were still Indians running in the forests, and the landlords hadn’t bothered to replace them. Instead, the tenants fortified their own apartment doors with enough locks to keep out an army of thieves. A man who got to be forty and still wasn’t his own best doctor was a man who needed a doctor. And a man who lived in Diamondback for more than forty minutes without becoming an expert locksmith was a man who needed his apartment burglarized.

The stink of piss hit them the moment they opened the inner-lobby door. Carella backed away from it as if struck in the face with a slops bucket. Meyer said, “Phhh,” and hurried toward the stairs. A radio blared from behind a door on the first-floor landing, the disc jockey’s rapid-fire spiel riding in over the rock-and-roll beat as he extolled the merits of a skin cream. On the second floor a scrawny calico cat was sitting in the hallway. She looked at the detectives warily, as though she were a burglary suspect. There were cooking smells and all the smells of living in the building, combining to render the nostrils numb. They knocked on the door to Sophie Harris’s apartment.

A woman said, “Who is it?”

“Detective Meyer,” Meyer said. “We spoke on the phone just a little while ago.”

They heard the locks being undone. First the deadbolt, then the Fox lock, its heavy buttress bar thudding to the floor as she lowered it. The door opened.

“Come in,” she said.

As they stepped into the apartment, Carella wondered what the majority of black people in the United States of America felt when they were watching black people portrayed on television. Did they think,
Golly, that’s me
? If they lived in a Diamondback apartment—where the first thing you saw upon entering was the exposed and rat-gnawed electrical wiring over the sink—did they think what they saw on television was an accurate portrayal of their own human condition? Or did those blacks cavorting on the small screen symbolize for them the hope of America? Could their own problems be one day reduced to the mindless sitcom chatter that flowed into their own living rooms, where overhead leaking pipes bloated the ceiling and would continue to do so till the plaster caved in, despite repeated phone calls to the landlord (who was white) and to the Department of Health (which didn’t give a damn)?

Sophie Harris was a woman in her late forties. She might have been a beauty when she was younger—her complexion was a warm chocolate brown, her eyes an amber the color of the cat’s, she was still slender and tall—but the burden of living in the non-television black world had stooped her shoulders and grayed her hair, lined her face and reduced the timbre of her voice to a hoarse whisper further weighted by the tragedy of the recent murders. She apologized at once for the appearance of the apartment—it seemed spotlessly clean to both Carella and Meyer—and then offered the detectives something to drink. Whiskey? Tea? There might be a little wine in the refrigerator—anything? The detectives declined. Outside the living room window, where they sat beneath the bloated and threatening ceiling, the neon sign of the bar across the street flickered against the curtainless night. There was the sound of an ambulance siren someplace—in this city, there was always the sound of sirens.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “there are some questions we’d like to ask about your son and daughter-in—”

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I’ll try to assist you as best I can.”

She was adopting the kind of formal speech many blacks used with whites, especially when the whites were in a position of authority. It was phony and fake, it denied the ethnicity that the phony and fake television sitcom shows simulated so well. To television-watchers, the sitcom shows were real. Never mind this shitty apartment in Diamondback. Whatever they saw on the
tube
was the reality. The
real
Depression family was the one on television, forget your own father who struggled along on five bucks a week in 1932. The television doctors were real, the television cops were real, everything on television was real except science fiction, and even that was more real than the moon shots.

So here they sat. Two real cops and a real black woman. One of the cops was Italian, but he didn’t wear a dirty raincoat, and he didn’t fumble for words and he didn’t pretend he was dumb. The other cop was bald, but he didn’t suck lollipops and he didn’t shave his pate clean and he didn’t dress like the mayor. The black woman wasn’t married to a man who owned a string of dry-cleaning stores, and she wasn’t dressed as if she were going to bingo. She was embarrassed by the presence of the two men because they were white—even though her own daughter-in-law had been white. And she was intimidated by them because they were cops. All three sat there in real and uncomfortable proximity because someone real had murdered two other people. Otherwise, they might never have met each other in their entire lives. That was something television missed—the purely accidental nature of life itself. In televisionland, everything had a reason, everyone had a motive. Only cops knew that even Sherlock Holmes was total bullshit, and that all too often a knife in the back was put there senselessly. They were here to learn whether there’d indeed been a motive; they would not have been surprised to learn there hadn’t been the shred of one.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “did your son and daughter-in-law have many friends?”

“Some, I believe.” Still the phony speech. Carella guessed she would use the word “quite” within the next several sentences. “Quite” was a sure indication that someone was using language he or she did not ordinarily use.

“Would you know their names?”

“I did not know any of their friends personally.”

“Did they ever talk bitterly about any of them?”

“No, I never heard them say anything nasty about anyone.”

“Would you know if they’d argued recently with—”

“I believe they got along quite well with everyone.”

“What we’re trying to find out is whether anyone—”

“Yes, I know. But you see…They were blind.”

Again the blindness. Again the blindness as a reason for denying the fact that they’d both been murdered. They were blind; therefore, they could not have been brutally slain. But they had been.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “please try to think beyond their blindness. I know it’s difficult to believe anyone would harm two helpless—”

“But someone did,” Mrs. Harris said.

“Yes. That’s exactly my—”

“Yes,” she said.

“
Who
, Mrs. Harris? Can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted to harm them?”

“No one.”

“Were there any problems either of them were having? Did Jimmy or your daughter-in-law ever come to you for advice of a personal nature?”

“No, never.”

“Were they happy together, would you say?”

“They seemed very happy.”

“Did Jimmy have another woman?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I would have heard about it.”

“How about Isabel?”

“She was devoted to him.”

“Did they visit you often?”

“They came at least once a month. And on holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving—they were supposed to come here next week. I already ordered the turkey,” she said. “Ten pounds. There was going to be six of us—Jimmy and his wife, my daughter Chrissie and her boyfriend, and a man’s been coming around to see me.”

Her speech had suddenly changed. Talk of the Thanksgiving holiday next week, of the homey preparations for it, had jerked her back into her own familiar speech pattern. These two white detectives might not be able to understand or to share her blackness, but at least they understood Thanksgiving. White or black, in America everyone understood turkey drumsticks and pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes and a word of grace.

“When they came to visit—”

“Yes,” she said, and nodded. She was thinking they would not come to visit ever again. The knowledge was plain on her face; it turned her amber eyes to ashes.

“Did anyone in the neighborhood comment about the nature of their marriage?”

“What do you mean?”

“That she was white,”

“No. Not to me, anyway. I guess there were some figured Jimmy had no cause marryin’ a white girl. But they wouldn’t dare say nothing to me about it.”

“How did
you
feel about it, Mrs. Harris?”

“I loved that girl with all my heart.”

“Did you know you’re the contingent beneficiary of your son’s insurance policy?”

“After Isabel, yes,” she said. “The second beneficiary.” She shook her head. “Bless their hearts,” she said.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Carella said, and watched her. “Bless their hearts,” she said again.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “this man you say you’ve been seeing…May I ask you his name?”

“Charles Clarke.”

“How long have you known him?”

“About six months.”

“How serious is your relationship?”

“Well…He’s asked me to marry him.”

“Have you accepted?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Do you think you
might
marry him?”

“I might.”

“Have you told him this?”

“I told him maybe after Chrissie was out of the house. She’s about to get married herself next year, the weddin’s set for June, that’s when her boyfriend’ll be graduating high school.”

“How old is she?” Carella asked.

“Chrissie’s seventeen.”

“And you told Mr. Clarke you might marry him in June?”

“After Chrissie’s out of the house, yes.”

“What’d he think about that?”

“Well, he’s in a hurry, same as any man.”

“What sort of work does he do?”

“He’s a fight manager.”

“Who does he manage?”

“Fighter named Black Jackson. You ever heard of him?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“He fights at St. Joe’s all the time. St. Joseph’s Arena.”

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “I hope this won’t offend you.” He hesitated. “Did you and Mr. Clarke ever discuss money?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did
he
know that you were the contingent beneficiary of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar insurance policy?”

“Yes.”

“You told him?”

“Jimmy did. He was talking about if anything should happen to him and Isabel, I’d be well taken care of. He had all to do to take care of hisself, but he was always worryin’ about me.” She looked directly into Carella’s eyes. “If you’re thinkin’ Charlie had anything to do with killing my boy and his wife, you’re dreaming, mister.”

“We’d like to talk to him, anyway,” Carella said.

“You can talk to him if you like, he lives right around the comer on Holman, 623 Holman. But it wasn’t Charlie who killed them. You ask me…”

“Yes, Mrs. Harris?”

“It must’ve been somebody crazy,” she said. “It
had
to be somebody crazy.”