Ghosts

by Ed McBain

  “Steve, it’s me again,” Fanny said. “This is hopeless. We’re going to have to look for a hotel someplace.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “On Waverly and Dome. We walked here from Coopersmith’s. The twins are freezing, they were both wearing only ski parkas when we left the house this morning.”

  “Waverly and Dome,” he said. “Try the Waverly Plaza, it should be right around the corner from you. And call me back when you’re settled, will you?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “I’ll be here by the phone.”

  “Have you had a drink yet?”

  “Yes, Fanny.”

  “Good. That’s the first thing I’m going to do when we find a bloody place to stay.”

  “Call me back.”

  “I will,” she said, and hung up.

  He went to the fireplace, tore yesterday’s newspaper—the one with Gregory Craig’s obit in it—into strips, and tossed them under the grate. He piled his kindling carefully on top of the shredded newspaper, stacked three logs on top of that, and struck a match. He was on his second martini when the phone rang again. It was Fanny reporting that they had managed to get two rooms at the Waverly, which they wouldn’t have got if she hadn’t pulled rank and told them that the poor shivering darlings over there were the wife and children of Detective Stephen Louis Carella of the 87th Precinct. He had never considered himself a man with any clout, but apparently his being a city detective had got Fanny and his family a pair of rooms for the night.

  “Do you want to say hello to the kids?” she asked.

  “Yes, put them on, please.”

  “They’re next door, watching television. Just a second.”

  He heard her calling to the twins through what was obviously the door to connecting rooms. April came on the line first.

  “Daddy,” she said, “Mark won’t let me watch my show.”

  “Tell him I said you can watch your show for an hour, and then he can watch his.”

  “I never saw so much snow in my life,” April said. “We’re not going to have to spend Christmas here, are we?”

  “No, darling. Put Mark on, will you?”

  “Just a second. I love you, Daddy.”

  “Love you, too,” he said, and waited.

  “Hi,” Mark said.

  “Let her watch for an hour, and then you can put on whatever you want, okay?” Carella said.

  “Yeah, okay. I guess.”

  “Everything all right now?”

  “Fanny ordered a double Manhattan from room service.”

  “Good. How about Mom?”

  “She’s drinking scotch. We almost froze to death, Dad.”

  “Tell her I love her. I’ll call in the morning, okay? What are your room numbers?”

  Carella put the receiver back on the cradle. He finished his drink, and then cooked himself some hotdogs and baked beans, and warmed a jar of sauerkraut, and ate off a paper plate before the fire, sipping at a bottle of beer. He cleaned up the kitchen afterward and went to bed at 9:30. It was the first time he’d ever slept alone in this house. He kept thinking of what had happened with Hillary earlier today. Someone swimming. A woman. Tape. Drowning. Tape Drowning. You stole. I heard. I know. I’ll tell.

  His lip still ached.

  He didn’t know quite what to do about switching back with Meyer. He had no desire to deprive him of his holiday, but at the same time he knew a door-to-door canvass of the Harborview building might prove an empty exercise tomorrow, when many of the tenants might be off sharing Christmas/Hanukkah with people elsewhere in the city. He decided to hit the building today, and the first call he made—from home—was to Meyer.

  Sarah answered the telephone. She told him her husband was in the shower and asked if he could return the call when he got out. Carella said he’d be there for another hour at least. He was already wondering how he’d get to work this morning; his car was still at the curb under what looked like seven tons of snow. He hung up and called Hawes at home.

  “Cotton,” he said, “I want to hit that building today.”

  “Okay,” Hawes said.

  “There are twelve floors, five apartments on each floor. If we split them between us, that gives each of us thirty apartments. Figure an average of fifteen minutes for each stop, we’ll be putting in an eight-hour day, more or less.”

  Hawes, who was not too good at arithmetic, said, “Yeah, more or less.”

  “You can go over there whenever you like,” Carella said. “I’ll be leaving here in an hour or so.”

  “Okay,” Hawes said.

  “You want to start at the bottom or the top?”

  “My father told me to always start at the top.”

  “Okay, fine, I’ll work my way up. Let’s plan on a lunch break at about one. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  “Right,” Hawes said, and hung up.

  Carella was himself in the shower when he heard the phone ringing. He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, ran out into the bedroom, and caught the phone on the sixth ring. Meyer was on the other end.

  “I was in the shower,” Carella told him.

  “We have to stop meeting in the shower,” Meyer said. “The fellas are beginning to talk.”

  “I was calling about tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, what do you think?”

  “I’ll have to hit that building today.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry, Meyer.”

  “Listen, you didn’t kill those people,” Meyer said. “How do you like the snow? Is it a white enough Christmas for you? How are you getting downtown?”

  “By subway, I guess.”

  “Like the poor people,” Meyer said. “Listen, don’t worry about tomorrow, okay? That was our original deal anyway.”

  The floor-by-floor, door-to-door canvass of 781 Jackson took Carella and Hawes a bit less time than they’d expected. Carella reached the building at a little after 10:00, a half hour after Hawes had already started on the top floor. They broke for lunch at 1:00, as they’d arranged, and were through for the day at 4:30. They stopped for coffee and crullers at a greasy spoon near the building and went over their notes together. It would later take each of them several hours to type up a collaborative report in quintuplicate from the notes they’d individually made. One copy of the report would go to Lieutenant Byrnes. Another copy would go to Captain Frick, who was in command of the entire precinct. The third copy would go to Homicide, and the remaining two copies would be filed respectively in the Craig and Esposito case folders. Normally, there would have been only four copies, but this was a case with a companion case, and vice versa.

  They had, until now, thought of the Esposito murder as the true companion case, despite the cross-indexing that labeled the Craig murder a companion case as well. Now they began to look at things in a somewhat different light. They were both experienced cops, and they knew all about smoke-screen murders. One of Carella’s earliest cases—this was before Hawes had joined the squad, even before Carella and Teddy were married, in fact—had seemed to focus on a cop hater who was running around shooting policemen. But that had been only the smoke screen; the killer had really been after a specific cop and was spreading vapor to mist over the true purpose. Before Hawes’s transfer to the Eight-Seven, he’d investigated a case in which the killer had chopped off the hands of his victim and then killed two other people elsewhere in the city and chopped off their hands as well. He was after insurance money, and he’d chopped off his true quarry’s hands because he didn’t want a fingerprint identification that would have disqualified the claim. The second and third murders were smoke-screen murders, designed to lead the cops into believing they were looking for some kind of freak who went around dismembering his victims.

  They would not have thought, until now, that the murder of Gregory Craig was a smoke screen for the murder of Marian Esposito. Everything seemed to indicate that the second murder was a murder of expedience—the killer fleeing from th
e building with a bloody knife in his hands perhaps, and being seen, and panicking at the possibility of later identification. Zzzzaaaahhhh went the knife, and zing went the strings of my heart. But now they wondered. They wondered because three separate tenants of 781 Jackson told them that Marian and Warren Esposito shared a marriage that could at best be termed rocky.

  The couple who lived next door to the Espositos—in Apartment 702, one of the apartments Hawes hit—told him that on two separate occasions Marian had called the police because her husband was beating her up. On each of those occasions the responding patrolmen had settled, on the scene, what is euphemistically known to the police as “a family dispute.” But Marian walked around with a pair of black eyes for weeks after the first beating, and her nose was broken during the second beating.

  The tenant in Apartment 508—who recognized Marian from the somewhat unflattering picture the Photo Unit had taken at the scene—told Carella that he’d been riding up in the elevator one time with the Espositos, and they’d started arguing about something, and Warren Esposito had grabbed his wife’s arm and twisted it violently behind her back. “Thought sure he’d break it,” the man said, and then offered Carella a glass of wine, which Carella refused. The man was waiting for his son and daughter-in-law to come visit him for the holiday. His wife had died six months ago; this was to be his first Christmas without her. He again offered Carella a glass of wine. Carella had to refuse; he was a cop on duty. But he lingered longer than the fifteen minutes he’d allotted for each apartment, sensing the old man’s loneliness and hoping to hell his son and daughter-in-law would not disappoint him.

  In Apartment 601, just below the Esposito apartment, the woman tenant there told Carella that there was always a lot of yelling and thumping going on upstairs, sometimes at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. She was wrapping Christmas gifts at her kitchen table as she disclosed the information. “Sometimes,” she said, and carefully tied a bow, “if there are children living above you, there’ll be a lot of running around and noise. But the Espositos have no children. And of course, everybody in the building knows he beats her.” She picked up the scissors and gingerly snipped off the end of the ribbon.

  “So it looks like we’ve got a wife beater,” Hawes said.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Came in yesterday wanting to know what we were doing to find his wife’s murderer,” Hawes said, and shook his head. “Had his lawyer call the lieutenant to turn on the screws. He must miss having her to bat around.”

  “I want to check this with Records, see if she really did call us twice,” Carella said. “Have you got some change?”

  Hawes dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of coins. Carella plucked two dimes from his palm and then went to the phone booth near the cigarette machine. At one of the other tables a blonde in her forties, wearing a sprig of holly on the collar of her coat, turned to Hawes and smiled at him. He smiled back. Carella was on the phone only long enough to get the information he needed. When he got back to the table, he said, “It checks out. First call was on August eighteenth, second one was November twelfth. I’d like to talk to Esposito right now, what do you say?”

  “I’m bushed,” Hawes said. “But if he’s our man, I don’t want him spending Christmas in South America.”

  They knocked on the door to the Esposito apartment at ten minutes to 5:00. Warren Esposito opened the door for them when he recognized Hawes through the peephole. He was wearing only trousers and a tank-top undershirt. He told them he was dressing to go back to the funeral parlor. He said he’d been there all afternoon and had come home to shower and change his clothes. His eyes were puffy and red; it was evident he’d been crying. Carella remembered Hillary Scott’s description of the “ghost” who’d slain Gregory Craig. Warren Esposito was perhaps thirty-four years old, with curly black hair and dark brown eyes. But how many other people were there in this city with that same combination of hair and eyes, including someone who’d announced himself as Daniel Corbett to the security guard on the day of the murders—and besides, who the hell believed in either mediums or ghosts?

  Warren Esposito was no poltergeist. He was perhaps six feet two inches tall, slightly taller than Carella and just as tall as Hawes, with muscles bulging all over his chest, his biceps, and his forearms. The woman Carella had seen lying dead on the sidewalk was perhaps five feet six inches tall, and he guessed she must have weighed 115 pounds. Nice man, Mr. Muscles Esposito, Carella thought, and asked his first question.

  “Mr. Esposito,” he said, “is it true that on two separate occasions your wife phoned the police for assistance in a family dispute?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Esposito said. “The people in this building ought to mind their own business. Who was it? Kruger next door?”

  “The patrolmen responding to both calls made full reports,” Carella said.

  “Well…there may have been one or two arguments,” Esposito said.

  “And your wife called the police, right?”

  “Yes, I suppose she did.”

  “During one of those arguments did you blacken both her eyes?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s in the report,” Carella said.

  “We were arguing, that’s all.”

  “Did you blacken her eyes?”

  “I may have.”

  “And on the second occasion did you break her nose?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you once twist her arm so violently that a witness thought you’d surely broken it?”

  “I know who that is,” Esposito said. “That’s Di Luca down on the fifth floor, isn’t it? Boy, I wish these goddamn people would mind their own business.”

  “Did you, or didn’t you?”

  “I suppose so. What difference does it make? What is it you’re trying to say, Mr. Carella? Are you trying to say I killed her? Just because we argued every now and then? Don’t you argue with your wife? Are you married?”

  “I’m married,” Carella said.

  “So don’t you and your wife—?”

  “Let’s talk about you and your wife, okay?” Carella said.

  “Where were you between six and seven P.M. on Thursday night?” Hawes asked.

  “Listen,” Esposito said, “if this is going to turn into a third degree here, I want to call my lawyer.”

  “You don’t need a lawyer to answer a few questions,” Hawes said.

  “Not unless the questions make it sound like I killed my wife.”

  “Only the answers can do that.”

  “I want to call my lawyer.”

  “Okay, call your lawyer,” Carella said. “Tell him we’re asking you some simple questions you refuse to answer, and tell him we may have to get those answers before a grand jury. Go ahead, call him.”

  “A grand jury? What the hell…?”

  “A grand jury, yes. Call your lawyer.”

  “I will.”

  “I wish you would. We’re wasting time here.”

  Esposito went to the phone and dialed a number. He listened as the phone rang and then said, “Joyce, this is Warren Esposito. Is Jerry there? Thank you.” He waited again, and then said into the phone, “Jerry, I’ve got two detectives here, and they’re asking questions about where I was Thursday, and threatening me with a grand jury…Sure, just a second.” He held out the phone to Carella. “He wants to talk to one of you.”

  Carella took the phone. “Hello?” he said.

  “Who’s this?” the voice on the other end said.

  “Detective Carella, 87th Squad. Who’s this?”

  “Jerome Lieberman, Mr. Esposito’s attorney. I understand you’ve been threatening my client with a grand jury if he—”

  “No one’s been threatening anybody, Mr. Lieberman. We wanted to ask some questions, and he wanted to call his lawyer. So he called you, and here you are.”

  “What’s all this about a grand jury?”

  “We want to know where he was when his w
ife was murdered. Your client has a history of wife abuse…”

  “I’d be careful what I say, Mr. Carella…”

  “Yes, sir, I am being careful. The police were called to this apartment on two separate occasions, I’ve already verified that. On the first occasion Mrs. Esposito’s eyes were bruised and discolored—that was on August eighteenth, Mr. Lieberman—and on the second occasion she was bleeding from the nose, and the patrolman making the report stated that the nose was broken. That was on November twelfth, last month. With such a record, I feel it’s reasonable for us to want to know where your client was at the time of the murder. If he refuses to answer our questions…”

  “Have you advised him of his rights, Mr. Carella?”

  “We’re not obliged to. This is still a field investigation; your client’s not in custody.”

  “Do you plan to take him in custody?”

  “On what grounds, counselor?”

  “You tell me. You’re the one with all the answers.”

  “Counselor, let’s quit playing games, okay? If your client had nothing to do with his wife’s murder, he’s got nothing to worry about. But if he refuses to answer our questions, we’ll subpoena him to appear before a grand jury, and maybe he’ll agree to tell them where he was at the time of the murder. Because if he refuses to tell them, as I’m sure you know, he’ll be held in contempt. Now we can do whatever you say, Mr. Lieberman. This is Christmas Eve, and you know as well as I that we won’t be able to get any grand jury action until the twenty-sixth, but if that’s what you want us to do, just say so. If you’d like my advice—”

  “Oh, are you an attorney, Mr. Carella?”

  “No, Mr. Lieberman, are you? We want some answers from your client, that’s all. My advice is for you to advise him to cooperate. That’s my advice. Free of charge.”

  “And worth every penny you’re charging,” Lieberman said. “Put him back on.”

  Carella handed the phone to Esposito. “Yeah,” he said, and listened. “Uh-huh…Are you sure it’s okay?…. All right, I’m sorry to bother you this way, Jerry. Thank you. And Merry Christmas,” he said, and hung up. “What are your questions?” he asked Carella.