Calypso (10 page)

    The rain lashed the living room windows. Carella kept staring at the dissolving panes of glass, listening to Barragan as he told now about the rain on the night seven years ago, rain coming down in buckets as the musicians, the gig over, their instruments packed, ran for the parked VW van at two-thirty in the morning, Freddie Bones with a newspaper tented over his head, his steel drum hanging from a strap on his left shoulder and banging against his hip as he ran through the rain, Georgie cursing and complaining that his new guitar case would get wet, Barragan himself laughing and running, slipping and almost falling, his flute case tucked under his raincoat to protect it. He was the one who slid open the door of the van, he was the one who climbed in first, George getting in behind the wheel and still complaining about the rain. Bones lighted a cigarette. Georgie started the engine, and then wiped off the windshield with his gloved hand, and looked toward the revolving doors at the front of the hotel, where men and women were coming out under the canopy and looking for taxis. "Where's Santo?" Georgie said, and the three of them looked at each other, and Barragan said, "He was right behind me when we came out of the John," and Georgie said, "So where's he now?" and wiped the windshield again, and again looked toward the revolving doors. "He'll be here in a minute," Bones said. "Calm down, why don't you? You're always up there on the ceiling someplace."

    They waited another ten minutes, and then Georgie got out of the van and went back into the hotel to look for his brother. He himself was gone for ten minutes before Barragan and Bones decided to go inside to look for him. "This fuckin hotel is swallowing up the whole Chadderton family tonight," Bones said, and both men laughed and went through the revolving doors, and then upstairs to what was called the Stardust Ballroom, which wasn't the Grand Ballroom, but a smaller ballroom on the mezzanine floor of the hotel. There were still some guests around, laughing and talking, but most of them had split when the musicians began packing. Barragan and Bones went into the ballroom, and talked to a sax player on the Cooper band-
Harvey
Cooper, that was it!-and asked him if he'd seen Georgie around, and he said last he'd seen of Georgie was him going into the men's room down the hall. So they went down the hall to the men's room, Bones making a crack about maybe both Santo
and
Georgie having fallen in, and Barragan laughed, and they pushed open the door to the men's room, but Georgie wasn't in there, and neither was Santo. They found Georgie outside the hotel's side entrance, talking to the doorman there, asking him about Santo. The doorman hadn't seen anybody come out carrying a set of bongo drums. George described his brother. The doorman hadn't seen anybody answering that description, either.

    "What did he look like?" Carella asked.

    "Santo? Good-looking kid, even lighter skinned than his brother, black hair, sort of amber-colored eyes."

    "How tall?" Carella asked, writing.

    "Five nine, five ten, around there."

    "Can you make a guess at his weight?"

    "Sort of skinny kid. Well, not skinny. Slender, I guess you'd call it. Muscular, you know, but slender. Sinewy, I guess you'd say. Yeah."

    "How old was he then, do you know?"

    "Seventeen. He was just a kid."

    "That would make him twenty-four now," Carella said.

    "If he's alive," Barragan said.

    

    

    Even driving as hard as he could through the torrential rain, Meyer did not get to Rawley, upstate, until a little after 6:00 p.m. He had phoned ahead first to verify that a man named Frederick Bones was indeed a prisoner at Castleview there, and then had phoned Sarah to tell her he wouldn't be home for dinner. Sarah sighed. Sarah was used to him not being home for dinner.

    Castleview State Penitentiary was situated on a point of land jutting out into the River Harb, a natural peninsula dominated by the gray stone walls that crowded the land to its banks on all three sides. A concrete foundation some thirty feet high slanted into the water itself, creating the image of a fairy-tale castle surrounded by a moat. There were eight guard towers on the walls-one at each comer of the prison's narrow end, two spaced along each of the walls angling back toward the main gate, and another at each comer of the wall fronting the approach drive. The massive main gate was constructed of solid steel four inches thick. Meyer rang the bell alongside it, and a panel in the gate opened.

    "Detective Meyer, Eighty-Seventh Precinct," he said to the face behind the bars. "I called earlier. I've got an appointment to talk with one of your inmates."

    "Let's see your I.D.," the guard said.

    Meyer showed him his shield and his lucite-encased I.D. card. The panel slammed shut. There was the sound of a bar being thrown back, and then the sound of heavy tumblers falling. The gate opened. Meyer found himself in a small entrance courtyard, walls on either side of him, a steel-barred inner gate directly ahead of him. The guard told him he'd picked a bad time for a visit; the men were at dinner. Which is where I should be, Meyer thought, but did not say. He asked instead if he could look at Bones's records while he waited for the dinner hour to end. The guard nodded curtly, picked up a phone hanging on the wall just inside the entrance door, spoke briefly to someone on the other end, and then went back to reading his girlie magazine. In several moments, a second guard approached the barred inner gate, unlocked it, slid it open, and asked, "You the detective wants to see somebody's record?"

    "That's me," Meyer said.

    "You picked a hell of a time to come up here," the second guard said. "We had a prisoner got stabbed in the yard yesterday."

    "Sorry," Meyer said.

    "No sorrier'n he is," the guard said. "Well, come on."

    He let Meyer into the yard, and then locked the gate behind him. The prison walls loomed enormous around them as they walked through the rain to a building on their left. In the guard towers, Meyer could see the muzzles of machine guns pointing down at the yard. He had lots of friend here, Meyer did-or rather business associates, so to speak. All part of the game, he thought. The good guys and the bad guys. Sometimes, he wondered which were which. Take a cop like Andy Parker…

    "In here," the guard said. "Records is down the hall. Who you interested in?"

    "Man named Freddie Bones."

    "Don't know him," the guard said, and shook his head. "Is that his straight handle?"

    "Yes."

    "Don't know him. Just down the hall there," he said, pointing. "Dinner's over at seven. You want to talk to this guy, you'll have to do it then. They get pissed off if they miss their television shows."

    "Who do I see after I'm through here?" Meyer asked.

    "Assistant Warden's office is around the corner from Records. I don't know who's got the duty right now, just talk to whoever's in there."

    "Thanks," Meyer said.

    "Got him with an icepick," the guard said. "Fourteen holes in his chest. Nice, huh?" he said, and left Meyer in the corridor.

    The clerk in Records was reluctant to open the prison files without a written order authorizing him to do so. Meyer explained that he was investigating a homicide, and that it might be helpful for him to know something of Bones's background before actually talking to the man. The clerk still seemed unconvinced. He made a brief phone call to someone, and then hung up and said, "It's okay, I guess." He found Bones's folder in a battered file drawer that had seen far better days, and made Meyer comfortable at a small desk in one corner of the office. The folder was as brief as the clerk's phone call had been. This was Bones's first offense. He had been convicted for "the unlawful sale of one ounce or more of any narcotic" (the narcotic having been heroin in his case), an A-1 felony, which-under the terms of the state's stringent hard-drug laws-could have grossed him from fifteen years to life in prison. Plea bargaining, which was permitted only within the A-felony class, had netted him ten. He could be paroled in three and a half, but that would be a lifetime parole; spit on the sidewalk or pass a traffic light, and he'd be right back behind bars again.

    Meyer finished his homework and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past six. He carried the folder back to where the clerk was busily typing something no doubt important. The clerk did not look up. Meyer stood by his desk, the folder in his hand. The clerk kept typing. Meyer cleared his throat.

    "You finished?" the clerk said.

    "Yes, thank you," Meyer said. "Any place I can get a sandwich and something to drink?"

    "You mean inside the walls?"

    "Yes."

    "There's a swing room across the yard. Show the tin and they'll let you in."

    "Thanks," Meyer said.

    He left Records, stopped in at the Assistant Warden's office to tell him he was here and ready to talk to Bones, and made arrangements for him to be brought into the Visitors' Room at seven sharp. The guards' swing room across the yard was equipped with machines serving up sandwiches and soft drinks. Meyer bought himself an orange crush and a ham on rye. He wondered what his father would have said about the ham. The guards were talking about nothing but the inmate who'd had his chest ventilated the day before. Meyer guessed things were tough all over, inside
or
out.

    At five minutes to seven, he went over to the Visitors' Room, and was admitted by a guard, who asked him to take a seat on one side of the long table that ran the length of the room. At seven on the dot, a tall, extremely handsome black man in prison threads came into the room and took a seat opposite Meyer at the long table. They were separated by a sheet of clear plastic three inches thick; Meyer had heard someplace that the plastic was the same sort used in the gun turrets of bombers during World War II. There were telephones before both men on their separate sides of the table. Each carrel was separated from the one on either side of it by soundproof dividers that granted at least a modicum of privacy to visitors and inmates. A sign on the wall advised that visiting hours ended at 5:00 p.m. and asked that visits be limited to fifteen minutes. The room was empty now, save for Meyer and the man who sat opposite him. Meyer picked up his telephone.

    "Mr. Bones?" he said, feeling very much like a straight man in a minstrel show.

    "What'd I do
this
time?" Bones asked into his phone. He smiled as he asked the question, and Meyer unconsciously returned the smile.

    "Nothing that I know of," he said. He took out a small leather case, allowed it to fall open over his shield, and held the shield up to the plastic divider. "I'm Detective Meyer of the Eighty-Seventh Precinct in Isola. We're investigating a homicide, and I thought you might be able to give me some information."

    "Who got killed?" Bones asked. He was no longer smiling.

    "George Chadderton," Meyer said.

    Bones merely nodded.

    "You don't seemed surprised," Meyer said.

    "I ain't surprised, no," Bones said.

    "How good is your memory?" Meyer asked.

    "Fair."

    "Does it go back seven years?"

    "It goes back thirty," Bones said.

    "I want to know what happened the night Santo disappeared."

    "Who says he disappeared?"

    "Didn't he?"

    "He split, that's all," Bones said, and shrugged.

    "And hasn't been heard from since."

    Bones shrugged again.

    "What happened, do you remember?"

    Bones began remembering. As far as Meyer could tell, he was remembering in great detail and with a maximum of accuracy. It was not until several hours later-when Meyer compared notes with Carella on the telephone-that he recognized that Bones's story was not without its inconsistencies. In fact, there were only two congruent points between the story Barragan had told Carella and the one Bones told Meyer; both men agreed that George C. Chadderton was an egotistical prick, and both men agreed it had been raining on the night Santo Chadderton disappeared. As for the rest-

    Bones remembered the job as having taken place at the Hotel Shalimar in downtown Isola, a hostelry every bit as palatial as the hotel
Barragan
remembered, but some ten blocks distant from it and on the
north
side of the city as opposed to the south. Meyer, listening to Bones, not yet knowing that Barragan had pinpointed the hotel as the
Palomar,
jotted into his notebook "Hotel Shalimar," and then asked, "When was this exactly, can you give me some idea?"

    "October," Bones said. "Sometime the middle of October."

    Later that night, Meyer would learn that Barragan had recalled the date as "Sometime in September. A Saturday night the first or second week in September." For now, blissful in his ignorance, Meyer simply nodded and said, "Yes, go on, I'm listening," and indeed did listen very carefully to every word Bones uttered, and faithfully transcribed each of those words into his notebook, the better to point up later the frailties of eyewitnesses even if they don't happen to be in a Japanese movie.

    The job, according to Bones, was a wedding job. Two society families, he couldn't remember the names. But the groom had just got out of medical school, Dr. Somebody-wait a minute, Bones would get it in a minute-Dr. Coolidge, was it?

    He was sure the kid was a doctor, there were a lot of doctors at the wedding that night,
Cooper,
that was it. Dr. Harvey Cooper! Everybody in tuxedos and long gowns, a real swanky affair with good-looking guys and gorgeous broads-especially one blonde who kept hanging around the bandstand all night long, giving Santo the eye. According to Bones, the blonde- who had not so much as put in a bit-appearance in Barragan's story-was one of those tall, healthy-looking, full-breasted, long-legged women he always associated with California. Man, the women out there were enough to drive a man out of his gourd, especially if the man happened to be a musician, which Bones happened to be. He could remember one time, this was after the Chadderton band broke up, he was doing a series of one-nighters on the Pacific coast, from the Mexican border all the way up to-