by Ed McBain
The door to the mailroom was set alongside the desk at which Miss Houlihan still worked on the ledgers. This time she glanced up as the two men went past. There seemed to be a faintly quizzical look on her face. Preston opened the door to the mailroom as though he were opening the door to a vault. A girl sat at a desk inside the windowless room. There were brochures stacked on the floor beside the desk. The girl kept reaching for the brochures and stuffing them into envelopes. She did this mindlessly—reaching, inserting, moistening the envelope flaps, sealing the envelopes.
“Would you leave us, please, Beth?” Preston asked, and the girl rose at once and walked out of the room. Preston closed the door behind her. Idly, because he was not here to look through advertising matter for ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers, coasters, swizzle sticks, or other assorted souvenir items, Carella picked up one of the brochures.
On the cover there was a line drawing of a man and a woman kissing. Above the woman’s head, and moving across the cover from left to right in delicate script lettering, was the legend Marital Aids for Lovers. Below the word Lovers, in a white heart on the extreme right-hand side of the cover, was the name of Preston’s firm, and below that its address on Dutchman’s Row. In the lower left-hand corner of the cover, in very small print, Carella read the words SEXUALLY ORIENTED ADVERTISING FOR ADULTS. Beneath this was the warning This catalogue contains advertisements which may be deemed sexually oriented under the new postal law. That law is concerned with seeing that sexually oriented advertisements are not thrust upon minors or persons not desiring such advertisements. Accordingly if you are less than 21 years of age, or if you do not desire to view a sexually oriented advertisement, DO NOT OPEN THIS CATALOGUE. Please be kind enough to request that we remove your name from our mailing list. We will then remove your name and make every effort to see that you do not receive any more sexually oriented advertisements from us.
“That’s explicit enough,” Carella said.
“It’s in accordance with the law,” Preston said.
“I’m sure it is,” Carella said, and since he was well over twenty-one years of age, and since he was also desirous of viewing a sexually oriented advertisement, he opened the brochure.
The items advertised within were many and varied.
Here was a cordless massager in a handsome grain finish in a choice of ivory or walnut colors. Here on the facing page was a set of double remote-controlled Ben Wa balls. Here now was a Ben Wa fringed tingle ball, and here a series of love potions ranging from stingers to energizers to vaginal teasers to penis sweeteners and to more exotically erotic efflorescences variously called Cunnilingus Powder, Erectos Capsules, Vipe Spice, and Jungle Love. Here was a life-sized doll complete with breasts and vaginal pocket, the blonde with no clothes selling for $32.50, the blonde with lingerie selling for $37.50, similarly naked or attired brunettes coming somewhat cheaper, with nary a redhead in evidence. Here was a vibrodongo marital aid and here a vibro-double-dongo marital aid. Here was something called a vaginal pal portable marital aid of durable construction with real-looking hair in a handsome gift box—only $17.25. Here, too, was something called an autosuck vagina, described as a male marital aid and guaranteed to operate from a car’s cigarette lighter.
The list of products went on and on, page after page of prosthetic extensions, electrical devices designed to provide sensuous vibrations, action playing cards featuring male-female “sexation” or female-female love, eight-track recordings or cassettes boasting “live stag-action,” a bath mat covered with foam rubber breasts, a wristwatch with sexual positions substituting for the numbers on the dial, a sensuous dictionary with full-color photographs, and lastly but not least inventively, a lipstick in the shape of a penis—described as “a tasteful gift for any woman.”
Carella closed the brochure. “Is this what you had Isabel Harris mailing for you?” he said.
“If she couldn’t see it,” Preston said, “how could it hurt her?”
Carella suddenly had the feeling that he could hack his way through the dense undergrowth of this city forever and still not reach a clearing where there was sunlight. He looked at Preston for only an instant, and then began searching through the desk that had been Isabel’s. He did not find a diary, he did not find a journal, he did not find a goddamned thing. When he left the office, he went down the corridor to the men’s room and washed his hands.
So now they snowballed it.
It was ten minutes past 12:00 on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and they sat in Lieutenant Byrnes’s office, drinking coffee brewed in Clerical and eating sandwiches Hawes had called down for a half hour earlier. There were four of them in the office: Carella, Meyer, Hawes, and the lieutenant.
Byrnes was a compact man whose clothes seemed too tight for him, vest open across the barrel chest, jacket pinched across wide shoulders, tie pulled down, and shirt collar open as though to allow breathing space for the thick neck that supported his head. His hair was a gray the color of the city snow; his eyes were a flinty blue. The men of the 87th called him “Loot” or “Pete” or “Boss.” He was the boss, the man in command of the squad’s sixteen detectives, answerable in the precinct only to Captain John Marshall Frick, who theoretically ran the whole shebang but who, in practice, gave Byrnes and the detective squad almost complete autonomy. Byrnes had read the reports filed by Carella, Meyer, and Hawes, and now he wanted to know what the hell was happening. There were four crimes that irritated him more than any of the others rampant in this city. At the top of the list was homicide. Beneath that, but comparatively rare, was arson. Then came rape. And then pushing dope. In Byrnes’s view, slitting the throats of blind people was tantamount to strangling innocent babes in their cribs. He was not too happy about the squad’s progress on this case; he was, in fact, a bit cranky and unpredictable this morning, and the men sensed this displeasure and tiptoed around it like burglars in an occupied apartment.
“So why are you wasting time with all this Army business?” Byrnes asked.
“Well,” Carella said, “the man was having nightmares, Pete—”
“I have nightmares, too. So what?”
“And also he’d contacted one of his old Army buddies about this deal he had in mind, whatever it was.”
“That’s according to his mother,” Byrnes said.
“She seems like a reliable witness,” Carella said.
“Witness to what?” Byrnes said. “She didn’t see this letter he’s supposed to have sent.”
“But he told her about it.”
“He told her he’d sent a letter to one of his buddies?”
“He told her the name, too.”
“But she can’t remember the name.”
“That’s right.”
“Then what the hell good is she?” Byrnes said, and picked up his coffee cup, and sipped at it, and then put it down on his desk immediately; goddamn coffee was cold. “He could’ve sent the letter to anybody in Alpha—he had all their addresses, isn’t that what you said?”
“Yeah, he got them at the reunion.”
“Anyway, what’s this letter got to do with his murder? I get back to what I asked you before: Why are you wasting time with all this Army business?”
“Because of the nightmares,” Carella said, and shrugged.
“What he figures,” Meyer said, “is that—”
“Does he stutter?” Byrnes asked.
“What?”
“Does Detective Carella stutter?”
“No, sir, but—”
“Then let him tell me himself what he figures.”
“I don’t know what I figure,” Carella said. “But it bothers me that Jimmy Harris remembered a rape that never happened.”
“That’s if you believe the girl.”
“I believe the girl,” Carella said.
“So do I,” Meyer said.
“What’s that got to do with the murders?” Byrnes insisted. “The man was murdered, his wife was murdered, another woman was murdered
.”
“I don’t think all three murders are related,” Carella said. “I think the first two are, but I can’t see any connection—”
“He just picked another victim at random, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, not at random,” Carella said. “Well, it could have been anybody, yes, in that sense it was random. But the victim had to be blind. He deliberately chose another blind person.”
Hawes had been silent until this moment. He said now, very softly because he was in this case only peripherally and didn’t want to make waves when the lieutenant was making enough waves of his own, “It could be a smoke screen, Pete.”
“Nobody’s that dumb,” Byrnes said.
“You don’t have to be smart to kill people,” Meyer said.
“No, but you have to be dumb to try covering your tracks by killing somebody else.”
“Let’s look at the only thing we’ve got,” Carella said.
“What’s that?”
“Jimmy wrote to an Army buddy concerning a get-rich-quick scheme.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“His mother thinks Jimmy may have had something illegal in mind.”
“Like what?”
“She was only guessing, but she figured he needed somebody who knew how to use a gun. Okay, let’s say he wrote to this person after the August reunion.”
“Why after the reunion.”
“Because he wouldn’t have known any addresses before the reunion.”
“Why didn’t he just talk to the man?”
“What do you mean?”
“At the reunion. Why didn’t he just go up to him and say, ‘Listen, I want to hold up a liquor store, are you interested?’”
“Maybe he didn’t get the idea till after the reunion,” Meyer said.
“Wrote to the man in September sometime,” Hawes said.
“And let’s say the man agreed to go in with Jimmy. Wrote back, or phoned him, or whatever, told him, ‘Okay, I’m in, let’s rob a bank.’”
“Okay,” Byrnes said.
“Okay, so they hold up the bank or the liquor store or the gas station or whatever…”
“Yeah?”
“And Jimmy stashes the loot in his apartment.”
“In the window box,” Meyer said.
“And won’t tell his partner where he put it,” Hawes said.
“So his partner follows Jimmy on his way home Thursday night, and tries to get him to talk, but Jimmy won’t.”
“So the partner slits his throat, and then goes to the apartment figuring that’s where the loot is…”
“Turns the place upside down…”
“Finds the money…”
“Kills Isabel…”
“And then kills Hester Mathieson the next night…”
“To make it look like some nut’s running around killing blind people.”
“How does that sound, Pete?” Carella asked.
“It stinks,” Byrnes said.
The police psychologist was a man named Manfred Leider. His primary job was to help members of the department who were having problems that could not be solved by the use of marital aids such as those Prestige Novelty sold through the mails. Occasionally, though, a law-enforcement officer came to him for information about criminal behavior. He had dealt with detectives like Carella before; he found the man sincere but limited. All too often, even the brightest of working cops had only a peripheral knowledge of the intricacies of psychiatric techniques. This one wanted to know about dreams. Where should he begin? Basic Freud?
“What exactly do you want to know?” he asked.
They were sitting in Leider’s office on the fortieth floor of the Headquarters building on High Street downtown. The island was narrow here; beyond the windows they could see both rivers that bounded the city. The day was cold and clear and sharp, they could see for miles into the next state.
“I’m investigating a homicide,” Carella said, “and the victim was having nightmares.”
“Mm,” Leider said. He was a man in his fifties, and he sported a graying beard that he thought made him look like a psychiatrist. In this state a psychiatrist had to go through four years of college, four years of medical school, one year of internship, three years of residency and another two years of clinical practice before taking the written and oral examinations he had to pass for a license to practice. That was why psychiatrists charged $50 an hour for their services.
Leider was only a psychologist.
When Leider first began to practice, even a garage mechanic could hang out a shingle and offer his services as a “psychologist,” whatever that might have been. Times had changed; there were now stringent licensing procedures. But many psychologists, Leider among them, still felt somewhat inferior in the presence of a psychiatrist or—God forbid—that most elite and august personage, a psychoanalyst. At a tea or a soiree in the presence of such learned men, Leider often talked of glove anesthesia and eulalia and waxy flexibility. This was to show that he knew his stuff. The funny part of it was that he really did know his stuff. Leider should have gone to see a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist might have helped him with his feelings of inferiority. Instead, he spent eight hours a day in an office at the Headquarters building downtown, where he talked to working policemen who made him feel superior.
“What sort of nightmares?” he asked.
“Well, the same nightmare each time,” Carella said.
“A recurring nightmare, do you mean?”
“Yes,” Carella said. Leider made him feel inferior. He knew that the word he’d been looking for was “recurring,” but somehow it had eluded him. Leider was wearing bifocal glasses. His eyes looked huge behind them. A crumb was clinging to his beard; he had probably just had lunch.
“Can you tell me the content of these recurring dreams?” he asked.
“Yes,” Carella said, and related the dream to him:
It is shortly before Christmas.
Jimmy’s mother and father are decorating a Christmas tree. Jimmy and four other boys are sitting on the living room floor, watching. Jimmy’s father tells the boys they must help him decorate the tree. The boys refuse. Jimmy’s mother says they don’t have to help if they’re tired. Christmas ornaments begin falling from the tree, crashing to the floor, making loud noises that startle Jimmy’s father. He loses his balance on the ladder and falls to the floor, landing on the shards of the broken Christmas tree ornaments and accidentally cutting himself. The carpet is green, his blood seeps into it. He bleeds to death on the carpet. Jimmy’s mother is crying. She lifts her skirt to reveal a penis.
“Mm,” Leider said.
“That’s the dream,” Carella said.
“Mm,” Leider said again.
“The dream was analyzed by a Major Ralph Lemarre…”
“An Army doctor?” Leider asked.
“Yes, a psychiatrist.”
“A psychiatrist, mm,” Leider said.
“And he seemed to think it was related to a gang rape that had taken place some years back.”
“Some years back from when?”
“From when he was treating the patient.”
“When was he treating the patient?”
“Ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago, mm. And the rape took place how many years before that?”
“Well, that’s just it,” Carella said. “The rape didn’t take place. We talked to the girl who was supposed to have been the victim, and it never happened.”
“Perhaps she was lying. Many rape victims—”
“No, she was telling the truth.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she told us what did happen, and it was a sex experience, but not a rape.”
“What is it that happened?” Leider asked.
Carella told him all about Roxanne and Jimmy being alone down there in the basement on a rainy day. The intercourse against the basement post. Thunder and lightning outside. The fear of discovery and punish
ment.
“What I’m asking,” Carella said, “is whether it’s possible…Look, I don’t know much about how this works. I’m trying to find out whether their making love in the basement that day could’ve become something different in Jimmy’s mind, could’ve become a whole big rape scene in his mind, and could’ve eventually caused nightmares. That’s what I want to know.”
“You say there was fear of punishment involved?”
“Yes. If the leader of the gang had found out, they both would’ve been punished.”
“Mm,” Leider said.
“What do you think?” Carella said.
“Well, there’s certainly a great deal of sexual symbolism in the dream, no question about that,” Leider said. “A tree is a dream symbol for male genitalia, and any sharp weapon is a dream symbol for the penis. The broken Christmas tree ornaments—commonly called Christmas balls—would seem another reference to male genitalia. And the dream figure cutting himself would seem to symbolize penetration of the body—sexual intercourse.”
“Then the dream could have—”
“And the memory,” Leider continued, “which is in itself a sort of dream, since you tell me it never really happened, substantiates the dream material by utilizing different sexual symbolism to restate essentially the same thing. Freud used as symbols of sexual intercourse such rhythmical activities as dancing, riding, and climbing. In the false memory, the gang leader is first depicted as dancing with his girlfriend, isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And you said the girl is carried later to a weed-covered lot…”
“Yes…”
“Well, in dreams of both sexes, pubic hair is represented as woods or bushes, so I guess by extension we can include weeds. In the dream, as I recall, the weeds have become a green carpet. The father figure bleeds to death on a green carpet, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Again we can refer back to the broken Christmas tree ornaments. A vase, or a flowerpot, or any such vessel—which a round Christmas tree ornament somewhat resembles—is a symbol for the female genitals, and the breaking might symbolize virginity and the bleeding normally associated with first intercourse. Was the girl a virgin, would you know?”