Long Time No See (4 page)

“Yeah, that ain’t it, Carella. He’s got more fuckin’ tags and crap hanging from his collar than all the dogs in this city put together. That ain’t it. It’s what are we supposed to
do
with him? This ain’t a zoo here, this is an arm of the police force and we got work to do, same as you. You want this fuckin’ dog in
your
office? You want him up there fuckin’ up
your
operation?”

“No, but—”

“Well, we don’t want him
here
either fuckin’ up ours. So what I’m telling you is we don’t hear from you first thing Monday morning about what disposition is to be taken with this dog here, then he goes to the shelter and may God have mercy on his soul.”

“Got you, Maloney.”

“Yeah,” Maloney said, and hung up.

The squadroom on any given Friday looked much as it did on any other day of the week, weekends, and holidays included. A bit shabby, a bit run-down at the heels, tired from overwork and overuse, but comfortable and familiar and really the only game in town when you got right down to it. To those who knew it, there were no other squadrooms anywhere else in the world. Plunk Carella down in Peoria or Perth, in Amsterdam or Amherst, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Transfer him, in fact, to any one of the new and shining precincts in this very city, and he would have felt suddenly transported to Mars. He could not imagine being a cop anyplace else. Being a cop meant being a cop in the Eight-Seven. It was that simple. As far as Carella was concerned, this was where it was at. All other precincts and all other cops had to be measured against this precinct and these cops. Territorial imperative. Pride of place.
This
was it.

This
was a room on the second floor of the building, separated from the corridor by a slatted wooden railing with a swinging gate. In that corridor, there were two doors with frosted-glass panels, one of them marked C
LERICAL
, the other marked M
EN’S
L
AVATORY
. If a lady had to pee, she was invited downstairs to the first floor of the building, where a door on the wall opposite the muster desk was marked W
OMEN’S
L
AVATORY
. There was once a Southern cop in the station house, up there to extradite a man on an armed robbery warrant. He saw the doors marked L
AVATORY
and knew this was where you were supposed to wash your hands, but he wondered aloud where the commodes were. In this precinct, a toilet was a lavatory.

In all of America, a toilet was something other than what it was supposed to be. It was a bathroom or a powder room or a restroom, but it was never a toilet. Americans did not like the word “toilet.” It denoted waste product. Americans, the most wasteful humans on the face of the earth, did not like to discuss waste products or bodily functions. Your average polite American abroad would rather wet his pants than ask where the toilet was. In the Eight-Seven, only criminals asked where the toilet was. “Hey, where’s the terlet?” they said. Get a clutch of muggers up there, a snatch of hookers, a stealth of burglars, they all wanted to know where the toilet was. Criminals had to go to the toilet on the average of three, four times a minute. That’s because criminals had weak bladders. But they knew what to call a toilet, all right.

There were only two criminals in the squadroom at that moment, which was a bit below par for a Friday afternoon. One of those criminals was in the detention cage across the room. He was pacing the cage, but he was not muttering about his rights. This was strange. Most criminals muttered about their rights. That was a sure way of telling a criminal from your ordinary citizen accused of a crime. Your criminal always muttered about his rights. “I know my rights,” he said, and then invariably said, “Hey, where’s the terlet?” The second criminal in the squadroom was being interrogated by Detective Cotton Hawes at one of the desks just inside the row of filing cabinets on the divider side of the room. Looking at Hawes and looking at the man he was interrogating, it was difficult to tell who was the good guy and who was the bad.

Hawes was six feet two inches tall and weighed 190 pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw and a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. He had a straight unbroken nose and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. He looked somehow fierce, like a prophet who’d been struck by lightning and survived. The man sitting opposite him was almost as tall as Hawes, somewhat heavier and strikingly handsome. Black hair and dark-brown eyes as soulful as a poet’s. A Barrymore profile and a Valentino widow’s peak—both before
our
time, Gertie, but not before the gentleman’s. He was sixty-five years old if he was a day, and he had been caught burglarizing an apartment that afternoon. Caught right on the premises, burglar’s tools on the floor at his feet. Working on a wall safe when the doorman walked in with a passkey and a cop. There was nothing he could say. He listened quietly to Hawes’s questions, and answered them in a low, exhausted voice. This was his third fall. The rap was Burglary Two—he’d been caught inside a dwelling, during the day, and he’d been unarmed. But they’d throw the key away nonetheless. He was not too happy a burglar on that Friday afternoon as dusk seeped into the squadroom.

Meyer turned on the overhead lights. Hawes looked up as if a mortar had exploded over his head. His prisoner kept staring at his own hands folded in his lap. But at a desk just inside the windows facing the street, Detective Richard Genero also looked up. Genero was typing a report. He hated typing reports. That was because he did not know how to spell. He especially did not know how to spell “perpetrator,” a word essential to advancement in the police department. Genero invariably spelled it “perpatrator,” which was exactly how he pronounced it. He also pronounced toilet “terlet.” That was because Genero came from Calm’s Point, a part of the city that spoke American the way the people in Liverpool spoke English. Genero was a relatively new detective. He had achieved this lofty rung on the ladder of police succession by shooting himself accidentally in the foot. Or at least that had been the opening gun, so to speak, in a series of events that brought him to the attention of the department brass and earned for him the coveted gold shield. He was not much liked in the squadroom. He was adored, however, by his mother.

He signaled to Carella now, and Carella walked over to his desk.

“P-e-r,” Carella said.

“Yeah, I know,” Genero said, and indicated the word on his report. He had spelled it correctly. This meant that he would ask for promotion to lieutenant next week. “Steve,” he said, “there was a call for you while you were out. Captain Grossman from the lab. Something about nail scrapings.”

“Okay, I’ll get right back to him.”

Genero looked up at the wall clock. “He said if it was after five, you’d have to call him Monday.”

“Did he find anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’s that in the cage?”

“That’s my prisoner.”

“What’d he do?”

“He was fornicating in the park.”

“Is that a crime?”

“Public Lewdness,” Genero said, naming the appropriate section of the State’s Criminal Law. “PL 245, a Class B misdemeanor. ‘In a public place, intentionally exposing the private or intimate parts of one’s body in a lewd manner or committing any other lewd act.’ Caught him cold.”

Carella looked at the cage. “Where’s the woman?” he asked.

“She escaped,” Genero said. “I’ve got her panties, though.”

“Good,” Carella said. “Good evidence. Very good, Genero.”

“I thought so,” Genero said proudly. “He can go to jail for three months, you know.”

“That’ll teach him,” Carella said, and went back to his desk. The offender in the cage looked to be about twenty years old. He’d probably been picked up by one of the hookers cruising Grover Park, figured he’d spend a pleasant half hour on a bright November afternoon, thinking his only risk would be frostbite, but not counting on the ever-alert protectors of the Law, as represented by Richard Genero. The offender in the cage looked as if he was more worried by what his mother would say than by the possible jail sentence he was facing. Carella sighed, opened his book of personal telephone listings, and dialed the police laboratory. Grossman answered the phone on the sixth ring. He sounded out of breath.

“Police lab, Grossman,” he said.

“Sam, this is Steve.”

“I was down the hall, let me get the folder,” Grossman said. “Hold on.”

Carella waited. He visualized Grossman in the glass-walled silence of the Headquarters building downtown. Grossman was tall and angular, a man who’d have looked more at home on a New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of the lab. He wore glasses, his eyes a guileless blue behind them. There was a gentility to his manner, a quiet warmth reminiscent of a long-lost era, even though his speech rapped out scientific facts with staccato authority. He had just been promoted to captain last month. Carella had gone all the way downtown to police headquarters to buy him lunch in celebration.

“Hello, Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“Here it is. James Randolph Harris, five feet ten inches tall, weight a hundred and—”

“Where’d you get this, Sam?”

“Identification sent it over. I thought you’d requested it.”

“No.”

“Maybe somebody here did.”

“Has he got a record?”

“No, no, this is Army stuff. It’s ten years old, Steve, the picture may have changed.”

“It’s changed in one respect for sure, Sam. He wasn’t blind then.”

“Do you want me to read the rest of this? I’m sure they’ll be sending a copy to you. They know it’s your case, don’t they?”

“They should know, yes. I had a man at the morgue this morning when Photo was taking prints. Wait a minute, here it is on my desk.”

“So you don’t need me to fill you in.”

“No, just tell me about the nail scrapings.”

“Your man was a gardener.”

“How come?”

“Soil under his fingernails.”

“Dirt?”

“Soil. Big difference, Steve. Dirt is what you and I have under
our
fingernails, right?”

“Right,” Carella said, and smiled.

“And all refined people like us,” Grossman said.

“Yes, to be sure.”

“But soil is what James Harris had under his fingernails. Combination of one-third topsoil, one-third sand, and one-third humus. Good rich potting soil.”

“Where do you garden in this city?” Carella said.

“On the windowsill,” Grossman said.

“Mm,” Carella said.

“Help you any?”

“I don’t know. Sam, his wife’s been killed, too, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Your boys were there this afternoon. I’d appreciate it if you got back to me with anything they found.”

“I’ll have Davies call you in the morning.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Will you be in the office?”

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be my day off,” Carella said. “Have him try me at home.”

“Okay. That it?”

“That’s it, Sam. Thank you.”

Carella hung up, started to open the manila envelope from the IS, looked up at the clock, and instead opened his personal telephone directory again. It was now ten minutes to 5:00, but he dialed the number anyway.

“Fort Jefferson,” a man’s voice said.

“Extension 6149, please.”

“Hold,” the man said.

Carella waited. In a moment another man’s voice came onto the line.

“CID.”

“Detective Carella, 87th Precinct. I need some information, please.”

“Captain McCormick is on another line, can you wait, or shall I have him call you back?”

“I’ll wait,” Carella said.

While he waited he opened the manila envelope from the IS. It was addressed to Det. Steven Carella, 87th Squad. Close, but no cigar. As Grossman had reported on the telephone, Harris did not have a criminal record; his fingerprints were on file solely because he’d once served in the United States Army. If he’d ever been fingerprinted for a civil service job, the IS would have come up with a similar make. The sheet told Carella very little. It gave a description of Harris, a date of birth, and prints for the fingers and thumbs of both hands. He was putting the sheet back into the envelope when McCormick came onto the line.

“Captain McCormick.”

“Captain, this is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad here in Isola. I wonder if you can help me.”

“Well…” McCormick said, and Carella knew he was looking at the clock.

“I realize it’s late,” he said.

“Well…” McCormick said.

“But we’re investigating a pair of homicides here, and I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

“What is it you need?” McCormick asked.

“One of the victims served with the Army. I’d like his service record.”

“You’d have to put the request in writing,” McCormick said.

“This is a homicide, Captain, we like to move a little faster than—”

“Is the murder directly related to the victim’s service in the Army?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking for someplace to hang my hat.”

“Mm,” McCormick said. “In any case, we don’t have the records for anyone who isn’t currently assigned to Fort Jefferson.”

“I realize that. You’d have to call St. Louis.”

“And it’ll take them anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours to make the search.”

“Would it help if I called them directly?”

“I doubt it,” McCormick said.

“Well,
would
you call them for me?”

“It’s almost five.”

“Not in St. Louis,” Carella said.

“Give me the man’s name.”

“James Randolph Harris.”

“When was he in the Army?”

“Ten years ago.”

“I’ll make the call. Do you want the entire Field 201-File?”

“Please. And would you tell them it’s a homicide and ask them to expedite it?”