by Ed McBain
HARRIS:
There was a…Somebody was playing the drums.
LEMARRE:
Where?
HARRIS:
On the record.
LEMARRE:
What record?
HARRIS:
There was a record playing.
LEMARRE:
In the living room?
HARRIS:
No, the…
LEMARRE:
Yes.
HARRIS:
The clubhouse. Oh, Jesus.
LEMARRE:
What?
HARRIS:
Oh, Jesus Christ.
LEMARRE:
What is it, Jimmy?
HARRIS:
He…
The door opened.
“Hi,” Janet said. “I got waylaid, I’m sorry.” She was carrying a cardboard container of coffee in each hand. She put them both down on the table, and then sat beside Carella and crossed her legs. “I hope you like it sweet,” she said.
“I like it sweet,” he said.
“Good. Did you find anything?”
“A major breakthrough.”
She took the lids off the coffee containers, and then moved her chair closer. “Mind if I read with you?” she asked, her knee touched his.
“No, that’s…fine,” he said, and reached for one of the coffee containers and almost knocked it over. His hand was shaking when he picked it up. He sipped at the coffee, and then began reading again. He was very much aware of Janet sitting beside him, her head close to his, her knee brushing his under the table.
HARRIS:
The clubhouse. Oh, Jesus.
LEMARRE:
What?
HARRIS:
Oh, Jesus Christ.
LEMARRE:
What is it, Jimmy?
HARRIS:
He…
LEMARRE:
Go on.
HARRIS:
It was Lloyd.
LEMARRE:
Who’s Lloyd?
HARRIS:
The president.
LEMARRE:
The president of what?
HARRIS:
Our club.
LEMARRE:
What club?
HARRIS:
The Hawks. In Diamondback. Before I drafted.
LEMARRE:
What about Lloyd?
HARRIS:
He was dancing with her. In the clubhouse, down in the basement. We was sitting on the floor, the five of us. There was drums goin’ on the record, lots of drums, sounded like…lots of drums.
LEMARRE:
Who was he dancing with?
HARRIS:
His woman. Roxanne.
LEMARRE:
And you and four other boys—
HARRIS:
Was sittin’ on the couch watchin’ them. They was dancin’ fish, Lloyd turn to us, he say, “What you lookin’ at, get yo asses out of here.” Roxanne say, “They don’t got to go if they tired.” Lloyd say, “They got to go cause I tell them to go.” She turn to us, she say, “You goin’ let him tell you what to do? The boys say, “Hell no,” they get up off the couch and grab him.
LEMARRE:
Where did he want you to go?
HARRIS:
Upstairs.
LEMARRE:
Why?
HARRIS:
’Cause we was just sittin’ there listenin’ to the drums.
LEMARRE:
What did Roxanne mean? About your being tired?
HARRIS:
We was tired, man. We been rumblin’ all the past month.
LEMARRE:
Rumbling?
HARRIS:
Gang-busting. With the enemy, man.
LEMARRE:
When was this, Jimmy?
HARRIS:
Just before I got drafted.
LEMARRE:
How old were you?
HARRIS:
Eighteen.
LEMARRE:
And you belonged to a gang called the Hawks?
HARRIS:
Yeah, a club.
LEMARRE:
And you’d been fighting with another gang?
HARRIS:
Started in December.
LEMARRE:
And when did this happen in the clubhouse? Was this still December?
HARRIS:
Just before Christmas.
LEMARRE:
You’d been fighting with another gang all that month—
HARRIS:
Heavy fighting, man.
LEMARRE:
And now you were resting.
HARRIS:
Yeah, and Lloyd told us to go on up.
LEMARRE:
What did he mean by that?
HARRIS:
I told you. Upstairs.
LEMARRE:
But Roxanne said you didn’t have to go if you were tired.
HARRIS:
Damn straight, man. The boys told Lloyd to shove it up his ass. Then they all grabbed him, you know, pulled him away from Roxanne where they were standin’ there in the middle of the floor. Record still goin’, drums loud as anything. Guy banging the drums there.
LEMARRE:
Who grabbed him?
HARRIS:
All of them. I was just watchin’ is all.
LEMARRE:
Then what?
HARRIS:
There’s this post in the middle of the room, you know? Like, you know, a steel post holdin’ up the ceiling beams. They push him up against the post. I got no idea what they fixin’ to do to him, he the president, they askin’ for trouble there. I tell them. Hey, cool it, this man here’s the president. But they…they…
LEMARRE:
Go on, Jimmy.
HARRIS:
They don’t listen to me, man. They just…They keep holdin’ him up against the tree, and Roxanne’s cryin’ now, she’s cryin’, man.
LEMARRE:
The tree?
HARRIS:
The post, I mean. Roxanne’s cryin’. They grab her. She fightin’ them now, she don’t want this to happen, but they do it anyway, they stick it in her, one after the other, all of them.
LEMARRE:
They raped her, is that what you’re saying?
HARRIS:
I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t. They carried her outside afterward, they picked her up and took her out.
LEMARRE:
Why?
HARRIS:
’Cause she bleeding. ’Cause they hurt her when they were doin’ it.
LEMARRE:
Where did they carry her?
HARRIS:
The lot.
LEMARRE:
What lot?
HARRIS:
In there, man.
LEMARRE:
In where?
HARRIS:
On the corner, there. Full of weeds. They throw her there.
LEMARRE:
Then what?
HARRIS:
Ain’t no…ain’t no…shit, ain’t no way to…
LEMARRE:
All right, Jimmy.
HARRIS:
What I’m cryin for? I didn’t hurt her, I didn’t do nothing to her.
LEMARRE:
It’s all right, Jimmy. You can cry.
HARRIS:
Why God take my eyes, man? Was the other four hurt her. Why God punish me?
LEMARRE:
Jimmy, what happened a long time ago has nothing to do with your getting blinded.
HARRIS:
It got everything to do with it, man.
That was the end of the session and the end of the transcript. Dr. Lemarre’s notes indicated that at this point Jimmy Harris broke down and began sobbing uncontrollably for the next half hour. The doctor finally had him taken to the ward and sedated.
At their next session Jimmy refused to discuss the incident again, or to name the members of the gang who had held Lloyd against the basement p
ost, and later raped Roxanne. It was the doctor’s opinion that the horror of the day—the irreversible set of circumstances that Jimmy had been unable to control or stop—was causing him to dream over and again of his father being killed. Lemarre couldn’t quite understand why, in the nightmare, Roxanne had become Lloyd’s father. He suspected that this was the reason a penis was attributed to the dream-mother: an attempt of the unconscious to explain the symbolism, a not unusual occurrence. But in addition, the unconscious mind was trying to tell Jimmy something else as well. It was saying, rather blatantly, that the symbolic death was in reality a rape. The woman in the dream had a penis under her skirt; in the actual event, there had indeed been penises under Roxanne’s skirt. When Lemarre asked Jimmy what had happened to Roxanne after the boys carried her to the lot, Jimmy said he didn’t know.
Did someone find her there?
I don’t know. She just disappeared, man.
You never saw her again?
Never.
What happened to Lloyd?
We kicked him off the club and got ourselves a new president.
“So that’s it, huh?” Janet said.
“I guess so.”
“That explains it all, huh?”
“Mm,” Carella said. He sounded very dubious.
“And now you’ve got what you came up here for.”
“I suppose.”
“Does it help you?”
“No.”
“Total loss, huh?” Janet said.
“I guess.”
“So why don’t you take me to dinner?”
Carella looked at her.
“I’m off duty at four,” she said. “You can come back to the apartment with me, and have a drink while I change. Then we can have an early dinner, and…quien sabe? That’s Spanish,” she said, and grinned. “What do you say?”
“I say I’m married.”
“So am I, but my husband’s in Japan at the moment. And your wife’s back there in the city, which means we’re here together all by our lonesomes. So what do you say?”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could, you could,” she said, and grinned again. “Just give it a try.”
“Even if I tried.”
“I know a great little restaurant near the hospital, candlelight and wine, violins and gypsy music, romantic as hell. Don’t you yearn for a little romance in your life? Jesus, I yearn for a little romance in mine. Let me go home and put on a red dress and then we’ll—”
“Janet, I can’t.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Janet…”
“No, that’s okay, really.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “Come on, really, it’s okay.”
He thought of her on the long drive back to the city.
According to a magazine survey he’d recently read, 50 percent of all American women between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were currently involved in extramarital affairs. That was a whopping huge percentage, considering the fact that back when Kinsey did his survey, the figure was only 38 percent. He did not know whether the figure applied by extension to the women of France, Germany, and Italy, belonging as they all did to the Common Market, but he suspected in his heart of Dickensian hearts that it certainly did not apply to the ladies of the British Empire—never, no never. In any event, and on any given day of the week, one out of two American women either were on their way to some gentleman’s bed or else had just come from some gentleman’s bed, the fellow in question not being related by marriage to the peripatetic lady. If one could reasonably assume, in the absence of any supportive slick-magazine evidence, that 50 percent of all men between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were similarly occupied, then 50 percent of the whole damn country was fooling around with somebody who wasn’t his wife or her husband or vice versa as the case might be.
The thought was staggering.
What made it even more staggering was the fact that a percentage-woman who was fooling around had chanced upon a percentage-man who wasn’t fooling around. Such odds, Carella surmised, were insurmountable—so to speak. But there they’d been, Sergeant Janet Somebody and Detective Steve Carella, in a room that reminded him of a monastery cell, heads bent as if in prayer, knees touching, and damned if he hadn’t behaved like a man who’d sworn vows of celibacy and near-silence. “Sorry, Janet,” mumble, mumble, “really awfully sorry,” mumble, finger the beads, say the vespers, drive back to the city wondering what had been missed beneath that olive-drab skirt, wondering what her lips, her breasts—
Cut it out, Carella thought.
He turned his mind instead to Lemarre’s report, and found the doctor’s conclusions as frustrating as had been the brief encounter with Janet. As a working cop, Carella would have felt compelled to examine more closely the criminal aspects of Jimmy’s traumatic memory, but perhaps psychiatrists didn’t work that way, perhaps they were only mildly curious about a bleeding rape victim dropped in an empty lot—
Did someone find her there?
I don’t know. She just disappear, man.
You never saw her again?
Never.
And that had been that, except for the incidental information that Lloyd had later been replaced by a new president. The basement rape would have happened twelve years ago, when Jimmy was eighteen. Simple enough to check with Sophie Harris to learn where they were living at the time, then check with the precinct, whichever precinct it was, for whatever they had on a street gang named the Hawks, a deposed president named Lloyd, and a rape victim named Roxanne. He’d do that when he got back to the city. Yes, he’d have to do that. Maybe Lemarre had cared only about getting to the root of the nightmares—if indeed he’d done that—but Carella was interested in knowing whether the perpetrators of a Class B felony had ever been apprehended.
He kept his foot on the accelerator, maintaining a steady sixty miles an hour, the limit on the thruway. At 4:45 he was still forty miles from the city, and it was beginning to get dark.
The woman who tapped her way along the sidewalk had lived in a world of darkness from the moment she was born. She was sixty-three years old, and lived alone in a building just off Delaware. Two dozen porn movie theaters and as many massage parlors were crowded into the square half mile that defined her neighborhood. The flesh castles were storefront operations, sidewalk plateglass windows painted out black or bilious green, hand-lettered signs advertising complete satisfaction at ten bucks a throw, NO RIP-OFFS. The skin-flick houses showed movies that never made it to the posher dream palaces on the city’s South Side, where ladies shopping for the afternoon stopped to rest their weary feet and simultaneously tickle their fancies with films artfully photographed and calculated to arouse.
The woman wore an accordion around her neck. She made her living playing the accordion. She did not think of herself as a beggar, and perhaps she wasn’t. She was a blind musician. She played on street corners, played tunes by ear on the instrument that had belonged to her father before his death. He had died forty years ago, when she was twenty-three. She had begun taking care of herself then, and was proud of the fact that she was able to manage. She did not know that the neighborhood in which she lived had become a cesspool over the past four years.
Each morning she said hello in passing to the tailor on the corner of Delaware and Pierce, and he returned her greeting while two doors down men entered a place called Heavenly Bodies, and across the street a theater marquee advertised a movie titled Upside Down Cake. She knew that drunks sprawled in doorways on the route from her building to the subway, but this was the city and drunks were expected, drunks had always been there. She did most of her shopping at the big supermarket four blocks from the apartment, and did not know that it was flanked by a pair of massage parlors respectively if not respectfully called The Joint and The Body Shop. Once a hawker for one of the rub-down emporiums handed her a leaflet upon which was depicted a flash of naked young ladies and a pate
of bald-headed men enjoying communal saunas and whirlpools and whatnots. The leaflet was wasted on the woman with the accordion. Her sightless world was serene; she truly saw no evil. But behind her, as she threw the leaflet away, she heard laughter dark and mysterious.