Calypso (4 page)

    "Never
used
any sidemen. Not recently anyway. He used to have a band one time, but he's been operating as a single for the past six years."

    "What was the name of the band?"

    "Don't know. That was before my time. I only started managing George when he went out on his own."

    "Would you know who was in the band?"

    "His brother was in it, but if you're thinkin of lookin him up, he's long since gone."

    "What do you mean?"

    "Split seven years ago."

    "Where'd he go?"

    "Don't know. Maybe back to Trinidad."

    "Is that where they're from originally?"

    "George and his brother were born here, but their father came from Trinidad. Maybe Santo went back lookin for his roots. His father split, too, you see. Longer ago than Santo did."

    "Santo? Is that the brother's name?"

    "Yeah. That's Spanish. Their mother was from Venezuela."

    "She still alive?"

    "She died six years ago. George used to say she died of a broken heart. Santo splittin and all."

    "Was this a younger brother, an older brother?"

    "Younger, but I don't know his exact age. You'll have to ask- Oh, Jesus. Chloe don't know yet, does she? Oh, Jesus."

    "Chloe?"

    "George's wife. Oh, Jesus, who's gonna tell Chloe?"

    

    

    Chloe Chadderton responded to their insistent knocking in a voice still unraveling sleep. When they identified themselves as police officers, she opened the door a crack, and asked that they show her their shields. Only when she was satisfied that these were truly policemen standing there in the hallway, did she take off the night chain and open the door.

    She was a tall slender woman in her late twenties, her complexion a flawless beige, her sloe eyes dark and luminous in the narrow oval of her face. Standing in the doorway wearing a long pink robe over a pink nightgown, she looked only sleepy and a trifle annoyed. No anticipation in those eyes or on that face, no expectation of bad news, no sense of alarm. In this neighborhood, visits from the police were commonplace. They were always knocking on doors, investigating this or that burglary or mugging, usually in the daytime, but sometimes at night if the crime was more serious.

    "Mrs. Chadderton?" Carella asked, and the first faint suspicion flickered on her face. He had called her by name, this was not a routine door-to-door inquiry, they had come here specifically to talk to
her,
to talk to Mrs.
Chadderton;
the time was two in the morning, and her husband wasn't yet home.

    "What is it?" she said at once.

    "Are you Chloe Chadderton?"

    "Yes, what is it?"

    "Mrs. Chadderton, I'm sorry to tell you this," Carella said, "but your husband…"

    "What is it?" she said. "Has he been hurt?"

    "He's dead," Carella said.

    The woman flinched at his words. She backed away from him, shaking her head as she moved out of the doorway, back into the kitchen, against the refrigerator, shaking her head, staring at him.

    "I'm sorry," Carella said. "May we come in?"

    "George?" she said. "Is it
George
Chadderton? Are you sure you have the right…?"

    "Ma'm, I'm sorry," Carella said.

    She screamed then. She screamed and immediately brought her hand to her mouth, and bit down hard on the knuckle of her bent index finger. She turned her back to them. She stood by the refrigerator, the scream trailing into a choking sob that swelled into a torrent of tears. Carella and Meyer stood just outside the open door. Meyer was looking down at his shoes.

    "Mrs. Chadderton?" Carella said.

    Weeping, she shook her head, and-still with her back to them-gestured with one hand widespread behind her, the fingers patting the air, silently asking them to wait. They waited. She fumbled in the pocket of the robe for a handkerchief, found none, went to the sink where a roll of paper towels hung over the drainboard, tore one loose, and buried her face in it, sobbing. She blew her nose. She began sobbing again, and again buried her face in the toweling. A door down the hall opened. A woman with her hair tied in rags poked her head out.

    "What is it?" she shouted. "Chloe?"

    "It's all right," Carella said. "We're the police."

    "Chloe? Was that
you
screamin?"

    "They're the police," Chloe murmured.

    "It's all right, go back to sleep," Carella said, and entered the apartment behind Meyer, and closed the door.

    It wasn't all right; there was no going back to sleep for Chloe Chadderton. She wanted to know what had happened, and they told her. She listened, numbed. She cried again. She asked for details. They gave her the details. She asked if they had caught who'd done it. They told her they had just begun working on it. All the formula answers. Strangers bearing witness to a stranger's naked grief. Strangers who had to ask questions now at ten past two in the morning because someone had taken another man's life, and these first twenty-four hours were the most important.

    "We can come back in the morning," Carella said, hoping she would not ask them to. He wanted the time edge. The killer had all the time in the world. Only the detectives were working against time.

    "What difference will it make?" she said, and began weeping softly again. She went to the kitchen table, took a chair from it, and sat. The flap of the robe fell open, revealing long slender legs and the laced edge of the baby-doll nightgown. "Please sit down," she said.

    Carella took a chair at the table. Meyer stood near the refrigerator. He had taken off the Professor Higgins hat. His coat was sopping wet from the rain outside.

    "Mrs. Chadderton," Carella said gently, "can you tell me when you last saw your husband alive?"

    "When he left the apartment tonight."

    "When was that? What time?"

    "About seven-thirty. Ame stopped by to pick him up."

    "Ame?"

    "Ambrose Harding. His manager."

    "Did your husband receive any phone calls before he left the apartment?"

    "No calls."

    "Did anyone try to reach him after he left?"

    "No one."

    "Were you here all night, Mrs. Chadderton?"

    "Yes, all night."

    "Then you would have heard the phone-"

    "Yes."

    "And answered it, if it had rung."

    "Yes."

    "Mrs. Chadderton, have you ever answered the phone in recent weeks only to have the caller hang up on you?"

    "No."

    "If your husband had received any threatening calls, would he have mentioned them to you?"

    "Yes, I'm sure he would have."

    "
Were
there any such calls?"

    "No."

    "Any hate mail?"

    "No."

    "Has he had any recent arguments with anyone about money, or-"

    "Everybody has arguments," she said.

    
"Did
your husband have a recent argument with someone?"

    "What kind of argument?"

    "About anything at all, however insignificant it might have seemed at the time."

    "Well, everybody has arguments," she said again.

    Carella was silent for a moment. Then, very gently, he asked, "Did you and he argue about something, is that it?"

    "Sometimes."

    "What about, Mrs. Chadderton?"

    "My job. He wanted me to quit my job."

    "What
is
your job?"

    "I'm a dancer."

    "Where do you dance?"

    "At the Flamingo. On Landis Avenue." She hesitated. Her eyes met his. "It's a topless club."

    "I see," Carella said.

    "My husband didn't like the idea of me dancing there. He asked me to quit the job. But it brings in money," she said.

    "George wasn't earning all that much with his calypso."

    "How much would you say he normally-"

    "Two, three hundred a week,
some
weeks. Other weeks, nothing."

    "Did he owe anyone money?"

    "No. But that's only because of the dancing. That's why I didn't want to quit the job. We wouldn't have been able to make ends meet otherwise."

    "But aside from any arguments you had about your job…"

    "We didn't argue about anything else," she said, and suddenly burst into tears again.

    "I'm sorry," Carella said at once. "If this is difficult for you right now, we'll come back in the morning. Would you prefer that?"

    "No, that's all right," she said.

    "Then… can you tell me if your husband argued with anyone
else
recently?"

    "Nobody I can think of."

    "Mrs. Chadderton, in the past several days have you noticed anyone who seemed particularly interested in your husband's comings and goings? Anyone lurking around outside the building or in the hallway, for example."

    "No," she said, shaking her head.

    "How about tonight? Notice anyone in the hallway when your husband left?"

    "I didn't go out in the hall with him."

    "Hear anything in the hall after he was gone? Anyone who might have been listening or watching, trying to find out if he was still home?"

    "I didn't hear anything."

    "Would anyone else have heard anything?"

    "How would I know?"

    "I meant, was there anyone here with you? A neighbor? A friend?"

    "I was alone."

    "Mrs. Chadderton," he said, "I have to ask this next question, I hope you'll forgive me for asking it."

    "George wasn't fooling around with any other women," she said at once. "Is that the question?"

    "That was the question, yes."

    "And I wasn't fooling around with any other men."

    "The reason he had to ask," Meyer said, "is-"

    "I
know
why he had to ask," Chloe said. "But I don't think he'd have asked a
white
woman that same question."

    "White
or
black, the questions are the same," Carella said flatly. "If you were having trouble in your marriage-"

    "There was no trouble in my marriage," she said, turning to him, her dark eyes blazing.

    "Fine then, the matter is closed."

    It was not closed, not so far as Carella was concerned. He would come back to it later if only because Chloe's reaction had been so violent. In the meantime, he picked up again on the line of questioning that was mandatory in any homicide.

    "Mrs. Chadderton," he said, "at any time during the past few weeks-"

    "Because I guess it's
impossible
for two black people to have a good marriage, right?" she said, again coming back to the matter-which apparently was not yet closed for
her,
either.

    Carella wondered what to say next. Should he go through the tired "Some of My Best Friends Are Blacks" routine? Should he explain that Arthur Brown, a detective on the 87th Squad, was in fact happily married and that he and his wife, Caroline, had spent hours in the Carellas' house discussing toilet training and school busing and, yes,
even
racial prejudice? Should he defend himself as a white man in a white man's world, when this woman's husband-a black man-had been robbed of his life in a section of the precinct that was at least fifty-percent black? Should he ignore the possibility that Chloe Chadderton, who had immediately flared upon mention of marital infidelity, was as suspect in this damn case as anyone else in the city?
More
suspect, in fact, despite the screaming and the hollering and the tears, despite the numbness as she'd listened to the details.

    White or black, they
all
seemed numb, even the ones who'd stuck an icepick in someone's skull an hour earlier; they all seemed numb. The tears were sometimes genuine and sometimes not; sometimes, they were only tears of guilt or relief. In this city where husbands killed wives and lovers killed rivals; in this city where children were starved or beaten to death by their parents, and grandmothers were slain by their junkie grandsons for the few dollars in their purses; in this city any immediate member of the family was not only a
possible
murderer but a
probable
one. The crime statistics here changed as often as did the weather, but the latest ones indicated a swing back to so-called family homicides, as opposed to those involving total strangers, where the victim and the murderer alike were unknown to each other before that final moment of obscene intimacy.

    A witness had described George Chadderton's killer as a tall skinny man, almost a boy. A man who looked like a teen-ager. Chloe Chadderton was perhaps five feet nine inches tall, with the lithe, supple body of a dancer. Given the poor visibility of the rain-drenched night, mightn't she have passed for a teenage boy? In Shakespeare's time, it was the teen-age boys who'd acted the women's roles in his plays. Chloe had taken offense at a question routinely asked and now chose to cloud the issue with black indignation, perhaps genuine, perhaps intended only to bewilder and confuse. So Carella looked at her, and wondered what he should say next. Get tough? Get apologetic? Ignore the challenge? What? In the silence, rain lashed the single window in the kitchen. Carella had the feeling it would never stop raining.

    "Ma'm," he said, "we want to find your husband's murderer. If you'd feel more comfortable with a black cop, we've got plenty of black cops, and we'll send some around. They'll ask the same questions."