by Ed McBain
“You said I could have Shana later, I just wanted to know how much later.”
“That’s none of your business,” Arthur said, and puffed on the cigar again.
“What does it say on the pink slip, Shana?” Carella said.
“It says two hours on the pink slip,” Arthur said. “That’s what it says on the pink slip.”
“I can’t wait that long.”
“That’s tough noogies.”
“I’d like to talk to you a minute.”
“What about?”
“Something personal and private. Is there someplace we can talk personally and privately?”
“Try the toilet,” Lauren said.
“Where’s the toilet?”
“Through the louvered doors.”
“I’m not going in no toilet with you,” Arthur said. “I’m going for my session with Shana.”
“Arthur,” Carella said pleasantly, “this will only take a minute.”
“I haven’t got a minute.”
“And I haven’t got two hours,” Carella said, and smiled. “Come on, Arthur, let’s talk this over. I’m sure the girls here don’t want any trouble, I’m sure you don’t want any trouble. Let’s just talk this over like gentlemen, okay, Arthur?”
“I’ll give you a minute,” Arthur said, and pushed through the louvered doors.
Carella followed him. There were three curtained shower stalls at the far end of the room beyond. A pair of urinals on the wall bearing the louvered doors. A dozen lockers on the wall opposite the door. Sinks. A black man stood near the sinks. He was wearing a red jacket and string bow tie. He smiled as the men came in.
“We want to talk privately,” Carella said. “Would you mind stepping outside a minute?”
“Got to watch the lockers,” the black man said.
“I’ll watch them for you,” Carella said.
“No, no, it’s my job.”
Carella took out his wallet, handed the man a five-dollar bill, smiled, and said, “We’ll only be a minute.”
“Well, okay,” the black man said dubiously, but he took the five-dollar bill and went out through the louvered doors.
“So talk,” Arthur said.
“Arthur,” Carella said, “look.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out the leather case to which his detective’s shield was pinned, and opened it. “Shhh,” he said, and put his finger to his lips.
“Great,” Arthur said.
“I’m not making a bust,” Carella said.
“Then what are you doing?” Arthur asked, looking even more distraught than when he had learned they were out of bourbon.
Carella noticed for the first time that he was wearing a gold wedding band on his left hand. “Arthur,” he said, “you only have to worry about one thing. You only have to worry about not telling anybody outside that I’m a cop. You understand that?”
“This ain’t my day,” Arthur said mournfully.
“This is your day, Arthur,” Carella said. “Believe me, it’s still your day. We’re going out there now, and you’re going to tell Shana you’ve changed your mind about a session with her.”
“If you’re going to bust this place, tell me, okay? ’Cause I’ll head straight for the door, okay? I can’t afford to be caught in a place like this, I mean it. So do me that favor, okay?”
“This isn’t a bust,” Carella said. “Let’s go, Arthur.”
“We might as well shower first,” Arthur said. “They ask you to shower here before you go in for your session.”
“It figures,” Carella said.
The shower had nothing to do with cleanliness; it had only to do with a legal defense known as entrapment. If Carella entered a room naked or wearing a towel, and a girl came into that room to give him a massage and to discuss fees for sexual services, it could be presumed that Carella had by his own conduct trapped the girl into offering herself to him. Considering this, and remembering that prostitution itself was the lesser of all the offenses in Article 230, a mere violation as opposed to the misdemeanors or felonies in the other sections of the article, it was hardly worth the trouble making an arrest. A violation was punishable by no more than fifteen days in jail and a fine of no more than $250. In cases where a policeman was dumb enough or eager enough to arrest a hooker, the girl was usually out on the street an hour after her pimp paid a $50 fine. There had been no recent massage parlor busts in the city for which Carella worked; the legal defenses were too plentiful. If you couldn’t get the people operating the joint, and you couldn’t get the girls performing the services, who was left? Guys like fat Arthur here, who was trembling inside his heavy overcoat at the thought of his wife finding out he’d been in Tahiti this Saturday night?
Carella went outside to tell Shana he was ready for his session.
He had showered, and dried himself, and wrapped an orange towel around his waist. The black man in the red jacket had given him a plastic bag into which he had put his holstered service revolver, his wallet, his leather shield-case, his keys, his cash, and his watch. The black man saw the Detective’s Special, but said nothing; five bucks can sometimes go a long, long way. Carella wrapped the plastic bag inside a second towel, and then pushed through the louvered doors into the lounge. Shana was there waiting for him. Arthur was nowhere in sight. Neither were the girls who had been there earlier. Carella wondered which of them Arthur had chosen.
“Will you want to take a drink in with you?” Shana asked.
“No, that’s fine,” Carella said.
“What’s in the towel?” Shana asked.
“Family jewels,” Carella said.
“I meant the one in your hand,” Shana said, and laughed. “Come on,” she said, and opened the door near the end of the bar.
Carella followed her into a narrow corridor that had bamboo on the walls and straw mats on the ceilings and floors. She opened a louvered door onto a room some six feet wide and eight feet long. A bed was snugly recessed into the niche formed by one entire wall and parts of two others. Covering the bed was a form-fitting print in swirling reds, yellows, and blues. The three walls enclosing the bed were mirrored. The narrow floor space between the bed and the fourth wall was covered with straw mats. Bottles of colored lotions that looked like all the oils of Araby rested on the floor, against the wall. There was a slip bolt on the louvered door. Shana threw the bolt, turned from the door, smiled at Carella, and walked to the bed. Sitting on it, she took off her shoes.
“So,” she said, and smiled again. “This is your first time in a massage parlor, huh?”
“Yes,” Carella said.
“Let me explain how it works. I give you a body rub for the twenty dollars you paid outside—you booked for a half-hour session, didn’t you?”
“Yes, a half hour.”
“Okay. If there’s anything you want in addition to the body rub, that’s extra.”
“How much is extra?”
“It’s usually twenty-five for a hand job, forty for a blow job, and sixty for sexual intercourse. But Lauren tells me you know a friend of mine, so maybe we can make a special—”
“No, I don’t know any friend of yours,” Carella said.
“You don’t? Lauren told me—”
“I was lying.”
Shana looked at him.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Why?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“You had to lie so you could talk to me?”
“I’d already asked for you by your real name. I had to go along with it.”
“How’d you know my name?”
“It was in someone’s address book.”
“Whose?”
“Your aunt’s. A woman named Hester Mathieson.”
“I don’t get this.”
“I’m a cop,” Carella said.
“Let me see the tin,” she said.
“It’s wrapped in the towel there. Believe me, I’m a cop.”
“Is there a gun in there
, too?”
“Yes.”
“So what is this? A bust?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Your aunt—”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t say it. Has something happened to her?”
“She’s dead. Someone killed her.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How?”
“Somebody cut her throat.”
“Oh, Jesus!”
The room went silent. Down the hall Carella heard someone laugh. A door eased shut. He looked at the girl. She was staring down at the ankle-strapped shoes on the floor. The sloping tops of her breasts in the bra top were dusted with freckles. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the shoes. Her fingernails were long and manicured, the color a red as bright as blood. He wondered what he should call her. Until a moment ago she had been Shana, a girl who casually quoted prices for sex acts with a stranger. But the name in Hester Mathieson’s book was Stephanie Welles, and mention of the murder seemed to have transported them both from this dimly lighted place of fantasy to a tenement hallway no less dimly lighted but only all too real.
“Miss Welles?” he said, and this seemed correct; she nodded briefly in response, still staring at her shoes. Against the wall the bottles of lotion shimmered with reflected light. “When did you see her last?”
“Before I started here.”
“When was that?”
“About six months ago. May. Is that six months?
“You hadn’t seen her since?”
“No.”
“Were you particularly close?”
“I liked her a lot. I guess maybe I loved her.”
“But you hadn’t seen her since May.”
“No.”
“Had you talked to her?”
“You mean on the phone?”
“Yes.”
“I tried to call her at least once a week. She was blind, you know. How could anybody…why would anybody…?” Stephanie shook her head.
“When did you talk to her last?”
“Last week.”
“When last week?”
“Thursday night, I guess it was. I get Wednesdays and Thursdays off.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Well, the usual.”
“Which was?”
“Well, you see, I lied to her about the job here. I mean, that’s why I stopped going to see her. Because if, you know, I had to sit there face to face and lie…She could sense things, you know. Blind people can sense things. And if I lied to her sitting right there in the room with her, well, she’d just know it, and I…I couldn’t bear that. My mother’s dead, you know, Aunt Hess was all I had, I didn’t want to…to hurt her…or to…you know…by her finding out I’m working in a place like this.”
“Where did you say you worked?”
“I told her I was a flight attendant. A stewardess. And I said I was based in Chicago and only got to the city here every now and then. I used to say I was calling from the airport. I told her I was trying to get my flight schedules changed so I could come see her again. I told her I was working on it. Meanwhile, I wrote to her a lot, and I called her whenever I could.”
“How’d you manage writing to her?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told her you were living in Chicago.”
“Oh. I have a girlfriend there, she used to work here at the Tahitian. She forwarded my aunt’s letters to me, and then I’d send my answers back, you know, for her to mail from Chicago.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just quit the job here, find some work your aunt—”
“Well, the money’s good,” Stephanie said, and shrugged.
“How’d you get started here?”
“Well, I don’t want to talk about it. I needed a job, that’s all.”
“There are lots of jobs in this city.”
“They don’t pay as much as this one. The job here gave me plenty of money for myself, and enough to send Aunt Hess a little every now and then. Besides, I wanted a Benz.”
“A what?”
“A Mercedes-Benz. I wanted one for the longest time. So I answered an ad in one of the fuck-papers, and took the job. I’m paying off the car now, I bought it on time. I make a lot of money here. And I’m really good at it,” Stephanie said, and shrugged. “I give good blow jobs.”
“How often did you send money to your aunt?”
“Every now and then.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars, a hundred. It depended.”
“Did anyone know she had this extra money coming in?”
“Why? Was she robbed? Did someone rob her?”
“No, it doesn’t look that way. But sometimes people get envious and—”
“It wasn’t that much money. I sent her whatever I could, but it wasn’t a fortune. Anyway, my aunt never told her business to anybody. I’m sure she wouldn’t have told anybody she was getting money from me.”
Again there was laughter down the hall. A girl’s laughter, high and genuine. Stephanie reached for a tissue in a box resting on the floor. She blew her nose, and tucked the tissue into the waistband of the skirted scarf covering the G-string. Then she looked at her watch.
“The last time you spoke to your aunt…” Carella said.
“Yeah,” Stephanie said, and nodded. “But could you please hurry it up, cause you paid for a half hour, you know, and they like us to keep track of the time.”
“Did she mention anything that was frightening her?”
“No.”
“Any threatening letters or phone calls?”
“No.”
“Anything that was worrying her, or troubling her…”
“Nothing,” Stephanie said.
“Nothing,” Carella repeated.
Driving back home to Riverhead, the faulty car heater clanking and rattling but doing little otherwise to defrost the windshield, he began adding up what he had. The tally came close to the nothing he had gotten from Stephanie Welles. He bunched his gloved fist, rubbed it against the rime forming on the glass, and cleared a spot about the size of a melon. He knew it would frost over again in no time at all, but meanwhile, he enjoyed the luxury of being able to see the road ahead. It was not yet 11:30, there wasn’t much traffic going out of the city this early on a Saturday night.
The case had begun on Thursday with the murder of Jimmy Harris, had lurched into Friday morning with the subsequent murder of Jimmy’s wife, and had zigged and zagged an essentially unrewarding path across the city and the state until it smashed into a dead-end brick wall with the murder of Hester Mathieson earlier tonight. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, three days, and the case was still as cold as a herring, red or otherwise.
Carella was tired and he was irritated and he was probably inconsolable, but he tried nonetheless to console himself with facts because he knew that in police work there were no mysteries; there were only crimes and the people who committed them. The people were sometimes professionals—as were armed robbers and burglars and some murderers. Or they were sometimes amateurs—as were most murderers. Or they were sometimes crazies—as were most pyros and some murderers and a mixed bag of other lawbreakers as unrelated as rapists or false-alarmists or muggers or parakeet-thieves or—
The facts, please.
Three blind people killed in as many days. Nothing stolen from any of them. Apartment of the first two victims turned inside out and upside down. Okay, the murderer was looking for something. What? Was it something Jimmy had buried? Dirt under his fingernails—soil, soil. So, yes, he had possibly buried something. Then why did the killer tear up the furniture and overturn the lamps and dump forks and knives all over the floor and generally behave badly? Because he didn’t know beforehand that Jimmy had buried whatever it was he was looking for. All right, then, did he find whatever Jimmy had buried? Yes, he found it. How do you know? Because he didn’t similarly ransack Hester M
athieson’s apartment. If he’d already found what Jimmy had buried, there was no need to search for it elsewhere. Good. In fact, brilliant. Then why did he bother to kill Hester Mathieson? If she had nothing he wanted, why did he kill her?
Problems, problems. There were always problems in the murder business. Carella had called Meyer the moment he’d got home from Fort Mercer, hoping to learn if Meyer had found any evidence of recent digging in the Harris apartment or in the backyard. He had his speech all prepared; he’d worked on it during the latter part of the tedious downstate drive. When Meyer got on the phone, he was going to say, “Well, did you dig up anything?” He was chuckling even as he dialed the familiar number, but he’d got no reply. Meyer was undoubtedly still at the wedding; it was not every day of the week that someone like Irwin the Vermin got married. Carella thought back to the day Irwin got bar mitzvahed. If memory served—and it did—that was the same day Cotton Hawes got transferred to the Eight-Seven. He could remember their first meeting in the lieutenant’s office, Hawes explaining that he’d been named after Cotton Mather the Puritan preacher, and immediately saying it could have been worse, he might have been named Increase. He’d taken him out into the squadroom and introduced him to Meyer, who was fretting about a liquor store murder that would surely cause him to miss Irwin’s—
The facts, please. Stick to the facts.
Three blind people dead in as many days. Nobody can remember anybody who had anything against Jimmy or Isabel or Hester. Nice people. Nice blind people, in fact, than which there are no people nicer. Except that Jimmy’s mother thought he was cooking up a crooked scheme like armed robbery or something with one of his old Army buddies, a likelihood Carella considered tantamount to discovering diamond mines on Mars—but who could tell? It’s a wise child who knows his own father, and it’s an even wiser mother who can spot a budding criminal in the little bugger she’d nursed and weaned. Hadn’t Jimmy, after all, once belonged to a street gang named the Hawks? He had indeed. This did not bespeak a lad who’d followed the straight and righteous all his livelong days, oh no. This bespoke a lad who’d bashed a few skulls in his time, and stomped a few ribs, and generally misbehaved as badly as the killer who’d torn up his apartment looking for something that may or may not have been buried, whatever the hell that might have been.