Long Time No See

by Ed McBain

  “Did you tell her ten o’clock?” Meyer asked.

  “Yes.” Carella knocked again. “Mrs. Harris?” he called. No answer. He knocked again, and put his ear to the door. He could hear nothing inside the apartment. He looked at Meyer.

  “What do you think?” Meyer said.

  “Let’s get the super,” Carella said.

  They went downstairs again, found the super’s apartment where most of them were, on the ground-floor landing at the end of the stairwell hall. He was a black man named Henry Reynolds, said he’d been superintendent here for six years, knew the Harrises well. Apparently, he did not yet know that Jimmy Harris had been slain last night. He talked incessantly as they climbed the steps again to the third floor, but he did not mention what he would most certainly have considered a tragedy had he known of it, nor did he ask why the police wanted access to the apartment. Neither Meyer nor Carella considered this strange. Often, in this city, the citizens did not ask questions. They knew cops only too well, and it was usually simpler to go along and not make waves. Reynolds knocked on the door to apartment 3C, listened for a moment with his head cocked toward the door, shrugged, and then unlocked the door with a passkey.

  Isabel Cartwright Harris lay on the floor near the refrigerator.

  Her throat had been slit, her head was twisted at an awkward angle in a pool of her own blood. The refrigerator door was open. Crisping trays and meat trays had been pulled from it, their contents dumped onto the floor. There were open canisters and boxes strewn everywhere. Underfoot, the floor was a gummy mess of blood and flour, sugar and cornflakes, ground coffee and crumpled biscuits, lettuce leaves and broken eggs. Drawers had been overturned, forks, knives, and spoons piled haphazardly in a junk-heap jumble, paper napkins, spaghetti tongs, a corkscrew, a cheese grater, place mats, candles all thrown on the floor together with the drawers that had contained them.

  “Jesus,” Reynolds said.

  The body was removed by 12:00 noon. The laboratory boys were finished with the place by two, and that was when they turned it over to Meyer and Carella. The rest of the apartment was in a state of disorder as violent as what they had found in the kitchen. Cushions had been removed from the sofa and slashed open, the stuffing pulled out and thrown onto the floor. The sofa and all the upholstered chairs in the room had been overturned, their bottoms and backs slashed open. There was only one lamp in the living room, but it was resting on its side, and the shade had been removed and thrown to another corner of the room. In the bedroom, the bed had been stripped, the mattress slashed, the stuffing pulled from it. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and overturned, slips and panties, bras and sweaters, gloves and handkerchiefs, socks and undershorts, T-shirts and dress shirts scattered all over the floor. Clothing had been pulled from hangers in the closet, hurled into the room to land on the dresser and the floor. The closet itself had been thoroughly ransacked—shoe boxes opened and searched, the inner soles of shoes slashed; the contents of a tackle box spilled onto the floor; the oilcloth covering on the closet shelf ripped free of the thumbtacks holding it down. It seemed evident, if not obvious, that someone had been looking for something. Moreover, the frenzy of the search seemed to indicate he’d been certain he would find it here.

  Carella and Meyer had no such definite goal in mind, no specific thing they were looking for. They were hoping only for the faintest clue to what had happened. Two people had been brutally murdered, possibly within hours of each other. The first murder could have been chalked off as a street killing; there were plenty of those in this fair city, and street killings did not need motivation. But the second murder made everything seem suddenly methodical rather than senseless. A man and his wife killed within the same twenty-four-hour period, in the identical manner, demanded reasonable explanation. The detectives were asking why. They were looking for anything that might tell them why.

  They were hampered in that both the victims were blind. They found none of the address books they might have found in the apartment of a sighted victim, no calendar jottings, no shopping lists or notes. Whatever correspondence they found had been punched out in Braille. They collected this for translation downtown, but it told them nothing immediately. There was an old standard typewriter in the apartment; it had already been dusted for prints by the lab technicians, and neither Carella nor Meyer could see what other information might be garnered from it. They found a bank passbook for the local branch of First Federal on Yates Avenue. The Harrises had $212 in their joint account. They found a photograph album covered with dust. It had obviously not been opened in years. It contained pictures of Jimmy Harris as a boy and a young man. Most of the people in the album were black. Even the pictures of Jimmy in uniform were mostly posed with black soldiers. Toward the end of the album was an eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

  There were five men in the obviously posed picture. Two of them were white, three of them black. The picture had been taken in front of a tentlike structure with a wooden-frame lower half and a screened upper half. All of the men were smiling. One of them, crouching in the first row, had his hand on a crudely lettered sign. The sign read:

  Among some documents scattered on the bedroom floor, they found the dog’s papers. He was a full-blooded Labrador retriever and his name was Stanley. He and his master had been trained at the Guiding Eye School on South Perry. The other documents on the floor were a marriage certificate—the two witnesses who’d signed it were named Angela Coombes and Richard Gerard—a certificate of honorable discharge from the United States Army and an insurance policy with American Heritage, Inc. The insured as James Harris. The primary beneficiary was Isabel Harris. In the event of her death, the contingent beneficiary was Mrs. Sophie Harris, mother of the insured. The face amount of the policy was $25,000.

  That was all they found.

  The phone on Carella’s desk was ringing when he and Meyer got back to the squadroom at twenty minutes past 4:00. He pushed through the gate in the slatted wooden railing and snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  “87th Squad, Carella,” he said.

  “This is Maloney, Canine Unit.”

  “Yes, Maloney.”

  “What are we supposed to do with this dog?”

  “What dog?”

  “This black Labrador somebody sent us.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine, but what’s his purpose, can you tell me?”

  “He belonged to a homicide victim,” Carella said.

  “That’s very interesting,” Maloney said, “but what’s that got to do with Canine?”

  “Nothing. We didn’t know what to do about him last night—”

  “So you sent him here.”

  “No, no. The desk sergeant called for a vet.”

  “Yeah, our vet. So now we got ourselves a dog we don’t know what to do with.”

  “Why don’t you train him?”

  “You know how much it costs to train one of these dogs? Also, how do we know he has any aptitude?”

  “Well,” Carella said, and sighed.

  “So what do you want me to do with him?”

  “I’ll get back to you on it.”

  “When? He ain’t out of here by Monday morning, I’m calling the shelter.”

  “What are you worried about? You haven’t got a mad dog on your hands there. He’s a seeing-eye dog, he looked perfectly healthy to me.”

  “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 t
o 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 CLERICAL, the other marked MEN’S LAVATORY. 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 WOMEN’S LAVATORY. 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 LAVATORY 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 e
yes 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.”