by Ed McBain
“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.”
Well, maybe it had been somebody crazy.
The city was full of bedbugs, true enough, and whereas they usually surfaced during the hot summer months, there was no law that said a lunatic couldn’t come out of the woodwork in the middle of November and kill two helpless blind people. The trouble with the crazies of the world, however, was exactly that: They were crazy. And with crazy people, you couldn’t go looking for reasons, you couldn’t start thinking about motives. With crazies, you just went along on the theory that maybe you’d stumble over a solution somehow, maybe the guy would go berserk in a crowded restaurant and you’d arrest him and he’d confess to having killed sixty-four blind people in the past month, all in different cities. One of them in London. There were a lot of crazies on television cop shows, the network reasoning being that the home viewer felt more content watching a show where a nut was doing all the killing, instead of a nice sane person with a motive, just like you or me. Crazies made very soothing killers. They were not much fun to track down, however, since there was no place to start and no place to go. All you could do was hope, and hope is the thing with feathers.
So they went to see Charlie Clarke, who at least had a possible reason for wanting Jimmy and Isabel Harris out of the way. In the land of the blind, and so on. And in the absence of any solid suspects, you grabbed for the nearest floating straw, hoping it would take on the dimensions of a lifeboat or a log.
The building on Holman was similar to the one in which Sophie lived. Lettered in white paint on successive risers of the front stoop were the warnings NO LOITERING and NO STOOP BALL. They went into the outer lobby, where a row of broken mailboxes was on the wall to their left. There was a nameplate for Charles C. Clarke in the box for apartment 22. The upper half of the inner-lobby door was a piece of frosted glass that had a crack running diagonally across it from the lower left-hand corner to the upper right. The door was unlocked. The ground-floor landin
g stank of piss and wine. There were no lights. Carella turned on his flash, and together they climbed the steps.
“What do you suppose the C is for?” Meyer asked.
“What C?”
“Charles C. Clark,” Meyer said.
“Oh. Clarence?”
“My guess is Cyril.”
“No, either Clarence or Clyde.”
“Cyril,” Meyer said.
The lightbulb on the second-floor landing had not been smashed or pilfered. Carella snapped out his flash. The metal numerals on Clarke’s door were painted the same brown color as the door itself. There were three visible keyways on the door; Charlie Clarke was no fool. There was also a metal bell twist just below the numbers. Carella took it between his thumb and forefinger, and gave it a twirl. The sound from within the apartment was sharp and jangling. He tried it again. He looked at Meyer, and was about to try it another time when a door at the end of the hall opened. A small boy looked out into the hallway. He was perhaps eight years old. He had brown skin and brown eyes, and he was letting his hair grow into an Afro. He was wearing bedroom slippers and a plaid bathrobe belted at the waist.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Carella said.
“You looking for Mr. Clarke?”
“Yes,” Carella said. “Do you know where he is?”
“At the gym. He’s got a prizefighter, did you know that?”
“Name of Black Jackson,” Carella said.
“You did know, huh?”
“Yep.”
“What’s his middle name?” Meyer asked.
“Black Jackson’s? He ain’t got no middle name,” the boy said. “Black Jackson, that’s his name,” he said, and raised his fists in a boxer’s classic pose. “I got the flu,” he said. “I’m s’posed to be in bed.”
“You better get back there, then,” Meyer said. “Where’s the gym?”
“Up on Holman.”
“What’s Mr. Clarke’s middle name?”
“Don’t know,” the boy said, and grinned and closed the door.
They started down the steps again. On the first-floor landing, Carella turned on his flashlight again. A huge black woman wearing a green cardigan sweater over a flowered housedress was standing at the foot of the steps as they came down to the ground floor. Her hands were on her hips.
“What’s the heat, Officers?” she asked. They had not identified themselves, but she knew fuzz when she saw it.
“No heat,” Carella said.
“Who you lookin for, then?”
“None of your business, lady,” Meyer said. “Go back in your apartment, okay?”
“I’m the super in this building, I want to know what you two men are doing here.”
“We’re from Housing and Development,” Meyer said, “checking on whether there’re lightbulbs on every landing. Go put in some lightbulbs or we’ll be back with a warrant.”
“You ain’t from no Housing and Development,” the woman said. Meyer and Carella were already in the outer lobby. They did not know whether or not Charlie Clarke had done anything, but they did not want a telephone call warning him that the police were on the way. Behind them, they heard the super saying, “Housing and Development, sheeeee-it.”
Charlie Clarke was a dapper little man wearing a yellow turtleneck shirt and a tan cardigan sweater over it. Dark-brown trousers. Brown patent leather shoes. Cigar holder clamped in one corner of his mouth, dead cigar in it. They found him on the second floor of the gym on Holman and Seventy-eighth, elbows on the ring canvas, watching a pair of black fighters sparring. One of the fighters was huge and flatfooted. The other was smaller but more agile. He kept dancing around the bigger fighter, hitting him with right jabs. All around the gym other fighters were skipping rope and pounding the big bags. In one corner a small pale man who looked like a welterweight kept a punching bag going with monotonously precise rhythm. Carella and Meyer walked over to the ring. Clarke had been described to them downstairs. The description proved to be entirely accurate, right down to the dead cigar in his mouth.
“Mr. Clarke?” Carella asked.
“Yeah, shh,” he said. “What the fuck you waitin’ on, man?” he shouted to the rink. The smaller, more agile fighter stopped dancing around the larger one, and dropped his hands in exasperation. The back of his sweatshirt was lettered with the name Black Jackson. “You never gonna knock the man out, you keep jabbin’ all the time,” Clarke said. “You had plenty opportunity for the left hand, now what were you waitin’ on, man, would you tell me?”
“I was waitin’ on an opening,” Jackson said.
“Man, there was openings like a hooker’s Saturday night,” Clarke said.
“Ain’t no sense throwin’ the left till there’s an opening,” Jackson said.
“You want to be the heavyweight champ of the world, or you want to be a dance star?” Clarke asked. “All I see you doin’ is dancin’ and jabbin’, dancin’ and jabbin’. You want to knock down a man the size of Jody there, you got to hit him, man. You got to knock his fuckin’ head off, not go dancin’ with him.” He turned abruptly from the ring and said, “What is it, Officers?”
“What you want us to do now?” Jackson asked.
“Go work out on the bag a while,” Clarke said over his shoulder.
“Which bag?”
“The big one.”
Jackson turned and began walking toward the far side of the ring. The larger fighter followed him. Together they ducked through the ropes. A loudspeaker erupted into the sweaty rhythm of the huge echoing room. “Andrew Henderson, call your mother. Andrew Henderson, call your mother.”
“So what is it?” Clarke asked.
“Jimmy and Isabel Harris,” Carella said.
“You’re kidding me,” Clarke said. “What’ve I got to do with that?”
“Is it true you asked Sophie Harris to marry you?”
“That’s right,” Clarke said. “Listen, what is this, man? Is this you’re lookin’ for information about somebody you think done this thing, or is it you’re tryin’ to hang it on me? Cause, man, from what I read in the papers, that boy was killed at around seven-thirty last night, and I was right here then, man, workin’ my fighter.”
“Don’t get excited,” Meyer said.
“I ain’t excited,” Clarke said. “I just know some things. You don’t get to be sixty years old in Diamondback without gettin’ to know a few things.”
“What are these things you know, Mr. Clarke?”
“I know when a black man’s been killed, the cops go lookin’ for another black man. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’ll give you six-to-five it’s cause I’m black.”
“You’d lose,” Carella said.
“Then enlighten me,” Clarke said.
“We’re here because you asked Sophie Harris to marry you, and you know she’s contingent beneficiary of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar insurance policy. That’s why we’re here.”
“You think I killed those two kids so I could latch onto the twenty-five, is that it?”
“What time did you get here last night?”
“Shit, man, I got half a mind—”
“If you’re clean, we’ll be out of here in three minutes flat. Just tell us when you got here and when you left.”
“I was here at seven and I left at midnight.”
“Anybody see you?”
“I was workin’ with Warren and a sparring partner.”
“Warren?”
“Warren Jackson. My boy.”
“Who was the sparring partner? Same guy there?”
“No, a kid named Donald Rivers. I don’t see him around, I don’t think he’s here right now.”
“Anybody else?”
“Only every fighter and manager in Diamondback. Warren’s got a fight Tuesday night. I been workin’ his ass off. Ask anybody in the gym—pick anybody you see on the floor—ask them was I here workin’ the boy last night. Seven o’clock to midnight. Had ring time from eight to nine
, you can check that downstairs. Rest of the time I had him runnin’ and jumpin’ and punchin’ the bags and the whole damn shit.”
“Where’d you go when you left here?” Meyer said.
“Coffee shop up the street. I don’t know the name of it, everybody from the gym rolls in there. It’s right on the corner of Holman and Seventy-sixth. They know me there, you ask them was I in there last night.”
“We’ll ask them,” Meyer said. “What’s your middle name?”
“None of your fuckin’ business,” Clarke said.
They checked around the gymnasium and learned that at least half a dozen people had seen Clarke on the premises the night before, between the hours of 7:00 and midnight. They checked with the owner of the coffee shop up the street, and he told them Clarke and his fighter came in shortly after midnight last night, sat around talking till at least 1:00 in the morning, maybe 1:30. According to the coroner’s report, Jimmy Harris had been slain sometime between 6:30 and 7:30 P.M. He had been able to pinpoint the time so narrowly because the body was discovered almost immediately after the murder; rigor mortis, in fact, had not yet set in. With Isabel Harris, the latitude was wider; the coroner guessed she’d been killed sometime between 10:00 P.M. and 1:00 A.M. In order to have killed Jimmy in Hannon Square at 6:30, and then get uptown to the gym in Diamondback by 7:00, Charlie Clarke had to have moved faster than a speeding bullet. The logistics were impossible. Nor could he have got downtown again to the Harris apartment during the time span the coroner had estimated for Isabel’s murder.
This meant nothing.