Calypso

3

Chloe Chadderton responded to their insistent knocking in a voice still unraveling sleep. When they identified themselves as police officers, she opened the door a crack, and asked that they show her their shields. Only when she was satisfied that these were truly policemen standing there in the hallway, did she take off the night chain and open the door.

She was a tall slender woman in her late twenties, her complexion a flawless beige, her sloe eyes dark and luminous in the narrow oval of her face. Standing in the doorway wearing a long pink robe over a pink nightgown, she looked only sleepy and a trifle annoyed. No anticipation in those eyes or on that face, no expectation of bad news, no sense of alarm. In this neighborhood, visits from the police were commonplace. They were always knocking on doors, investigating this or that burglary or mugging, usually in the daytime, but sometimes at night if the crime was more serious.

“Mrs. Chadderton?” Carella asked, and the first faint suspicion flickered on her face. He had called her by name, this was not a routine door-to-door inquiry, they had come here specifically to talk to her, to talk to Mrs. Chadderton; the time was two in the morning, and her husband wasn’t yet home.

“What is it?” she said at once.

“Are you Chloe Chadderton?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Mrs. Chadderton, I’m sorry to tell you this,” Carella said, “but your husband—”

“What is it?” she said. “Has he been hurt?”

“He’s dead,” Carella said.

The woman flinched at his words. She backed away from him, shaking her head as she moved out of the doorway, back into the kitchen, against the refrigerator, shaking her head, staring at him.

“I’m sorry,” Carella said. “May we come in?”

“George?” she said. “Is it George Chadderton? Are you sure you have the right...?”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” Carella said.

She screamed then. She screamed and immediately brought her hand to her mouth, and bit down hard on the knuckle of her bent index finger. She turned her back to them. She stood by the refrigerator, the scream trailing into a choking sob that swelled into a torrent of tears. Carella and Meyer stood just outside the open door. Meyer was looking down at his shoes.

“Mrs. Chadderton?” Carella said.

Weeping, she shook her head, and — still with her back to them — gestured with one hand widespread behind her, the fingers patting the air, silently asking them to wait. They waited. She fumbled in the pocket of the robe for a handkerchief, found none, went to the sink where a roll of paper towels hung over the drain board, tore one loose, and buried her face in it, sobbing. She blew her nose. She began sobbing again, and again buried her face in the toweling. A door down the hall opened. A woman with her hair tied in rags poked her head out.

“What is it?” she shouted. “Chloe?”

“It’s all right,” Carella said. “We’re the police.”

“Chloe? Was that you screamin?”

“They’re the police,” Chloe murmured.

“It’s all right, go back to sleep,” Carella said, and entered the apartment behind Meyer, and closed the door.

It wasn’t all right; there was no going back to sleep for Chloe Chadderton. She wanted to know what had happened, and they told her. She listened, numbed. She cried again. She asked for details. They gave her the details. She asked if they had caught who’d done it. They told her they had just begun working on it. All the formula answers. Strangers bearing witness to a stranger’s naked grief. Strangers who had to ask questions now at ten past two in the morning because someone had taken another man’s life, and these first twenty-four hours were the most important.

“We can come back in the morning,” Carella said, hoping she would not ask them to. He wanted the time edge. The killer had all the time in the world. Only the detectives were working against time.

“What difference will it make?” she said, and began weeping softly again. She went to the kitchen table, took a chair from it, and sat. The flap of the robe fell open, revealing long slender legs and the laced edge of the baby-doll nightgown. “Please sit down,” she said.

Carella took a chair at the table. Meyer stood near the refrigerator. He had taken off the Professor Higgins hat. His coat was sopping wet from the rain outside.

“Mrs. Chadderton,” Carella said gently, “can you tell me when you last saw your husband alive?”

“When he left the apartment tonight.”

“When was that? What time?”

“About seven-thirty. Ame stopped by to pick him up.”

“Ame?”

“Ambrose Harding. His manager.”

“Did your husband receive any phone calls before he left the apartment?”

“No calls.”

“Did anyone try to reach him after he left?”

“No one.”

“Were you here all night, Mrs. Chadderton?”

“Yes, all night.”

“Then you would have heard the phone—”

“Yes.”

“And answered it, if it had rung.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Chadderton, have you ever answered the phone in recent weeks only to have the caller hang up on you?”

“No.”

“If your husband had received any threatening calls, would he have mentioned them to you?”

“Yes, I’m sure he would have.”

“Were there any such calls?”

“No.”

“Any hate mail?”

“No.”

“Has he had any recent arguments with anyone about money, or—”

“Everybody has arguments,” she said.

“Did your husband have a recent argument with someone?”

“What kind of argument?”

“About anything at all, however insignificant it might have seemed at the time.”

“Well, everybody has arguments,” she said again.

Carella was silent for a moment. Then, very gently, he asked, “Did you and he argue about something, is that it?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about, Mrs. Chadderton?”

“My job. He wanted me to quit my job.”

“What is your job?”

“I’m a dancer.”

“Where do you dance?”

“At the Flamingo. On Landis Avenue.” She hesitated. Her eyes met his. “It’s a topless club.”

“I see,” Carella said.

“My husband didn’t like the idea of me dancing there. He asked me to quit the job. But it brings in money,” she said.

“George wasn’t earning all that much with his calypso.”

“How much would you say he normally—”

“Two, three hundred a week, some weeks. Other weeks, nothing.”

“Did he owe anyone money?”

“No. But that’s only because of the dancing. That’s why I didn’t want to quit the job. We wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet otherwise.”

“But aside from any arguments you had about your job...”

“We didn’t argue about anything else,” she said, and suddenly burst into tears again.

“I’m sorry,” Carella said at once. “If this is difficult for you right now, we’ll come back in the morning. Would you prefer that?”

“No, that’s all right,” she said.

“Then... can you tell me if your husband argued with anyone else recently?”

“Nobody I can think of.”

“Mrs. Chadderton, in the past several days have you noticed anyone who seemed particularly interested in your husband’s comings and goings? Anyone lurking around outside the building or in the hallway, for example.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“How about tonight? Notice anyone in the hallway when your husband left?”

“I didn’t go out in the hall with him.”

“Hear anything in the hall after he was gone? Anyone who might have been listening or watching, trying to find out if he was still home?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Would anyone else have heard anything?”

“How would I know?”

“I meant, was there anyone here with you? A neighbor? A friend?”

“I was alone.”

“Mrs. Chadderton,” he said, “I have to ask this next question, I hope you’ll forgive me for asking it.”

“George wasn’t fooling around with any other women,” she said at once. “Is that the question?”

“That was the question, yes.”

“And I wasn’t fooling around with any other men.”

“The reason he had to ask,” Meyer said, “is—”

“I know why he had to ask,” Chloe said. “But I don’t think he’d have asked a white woman that same question.”

“White or black, the questions are the same,” Carella said flatly. “If you were having trouble in your marriage—”

“There was no trouble in my marriage,” she said, turning to him, her dark eyes blazing.

“Fine then, the matter is closed.”

It was not closed, not so far as Carella was concerned. He would come back to it later if only because Chloe’s reaction had been so violent. In the meantime, he picked up again on the line of questioning that was mandatory in any homicide.

“Mrs. Chadderton,” he said, “at any time during the past few weeks—”

“Because I guess it’s impossible for two black people to have a good marriage, right?” she said, again coming back to the matter — which apparently was not yet closed for her, either.

Carella wondered what to say next. Should he go through the tired “Some of My Best Friends Are Blacks” routine? Should he explain that Arthur Brown, a detective on the 87th Squad, was in fact happily married and that he and his wife, Caroline, had spent hours in the Carellas’ house discussing toilet training and school busing and, yes, even racial prejudice? Should he defend himself as a white man in a white man’s world, when this woman’s husband — a black man — had been robbed of his life in a section of the precinct that was at least 50 percent black? Should he ignore the possibility that Chloe Chadderton, who had immediately flared upon mention of marital infidelity, was as suspect in this damn case as anyone else in the city? More suspect, in fact, despite the screaming and the hollering and the tears, despite the numbness as she’d listened to the details.

White or black, they all seemed numb, even the ones who’d stuck an ice pick in someone’s skull an hour earlier; they all seemed numb. The tears were sometimes genuine and sometimes not; sometimes, they were only tears of guilt or relief. In this city where husbands killed wives and lovers killed rivals; in this city where children were starved or beaten to death by their parents, and grandmothers were slain by their junkie grandsons for the few dollars in their purses; in this city any immediate member of the family was not only a possible murderer but a probable one. The crime statistics here changed as often as did the weather, but the latest ones indicated a swing back to so-called family homicides, as opposed to those involving total strangers, where the victim and the murderer alike were unknown to each other before that final moment of obscene intimacy.

A witness had described George Chadderton’s killer as a tall skinny man, almost a boy. A man who looked like a teenager. Chloe Chadderton was perhaps five feet nine inches tall, with the lithe, supple body of a dancer. Given the poor visibility of the rain-drenched night, mightn’t she have passed for a teenage boy? In Shakespeare’s time, it was the teenage boys who’d acted the women’s roles in his plays. Chloe had taken offense at a question routinely asked and now chose to cloud the issue with black indignation, perhaps genuine, perhaps intended only to bewilder and confuse. So Carella looked at her, and wondered what he should say next. Get tough? Get apologetic? Ignore the challenge? What? In the silence, rain lashed the single window in the kitchen. Carella had the feeling it would never stop raining.

“Ma’am,” he said, “we want to find your husband’s murderer. If you’d feel more comfortable with a black cop, we’ve got plenty of black cops, and we’ll send some around. They’ll ask the same questions.”

She looked at him.

“The same questions,” he repeated.

“Ask your questions,” she said, and folded her arms across her breasts.

“All right,” he said, and nodded. “At any time during the past few weeks did you notice anything strange about your husband’s behavior?”

“Strange how?” Chloe said. Her voice was still edged with anger, her arms were still folded defensively across her breasts.

“Anything out of the ordinary, any breaks in his usual routine — I take it you knew most of his friends and business acquaintances.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Were there any such breaks in his usual routine?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did your husband keep an appointment calendar?”

“Yes.”

“Is it here in the apartment?”

“In the bedroom. On the dresser.”

“Could I see it, Mrs. Chadderton?”

“Yes,” she said, and rose and left the room. Carella and Meyer waited. Somewhere outside, far below, a drainpipe dripped steadily and noisily. When Chloe came back into the room, she was carrying a black appointment book in her hand. She gave it to Carella, and he immediately opened it to the two facing pages for the month of September.

“Today’s the fifteenth,” Meyer said.

Carella nodded, and then began scanning the entries for the week beginning September eleventh. On Monday at 3:00 P.M., according to the entry scrawled in black ink in the square for that date, George Chadderton had gone for a haircut. On Tuesday at 12:30 P.M., he’d had lunch with someone identified only as Charlie. Carella looked up.

“Who’s Charlie?” he said.

“Charlie?”

“‘Lunch 12:30 P.M., Charlie,’” Carella read.

“Oh. That’s not a person, it’s a place. Restaurant called Charlie down on Granada Street.”

“Have any idea who your husband had lunch with that day?”

“No. He was always meeting with people, discussing gigs and contracts and like that.”

“Didn’t Ambrose Harding handle all his business affairs?”

“Yes, but George liked to meet who he’d be playing for, the promoter or the man who owned the hall or whoever.”

Carella nodded and looked down at the calendar again. There were no entries for Wednesday. For Thursday, the fourteenth, there were two entries: “Office, 11:00 A.M.” and “Lunch 1:00 P.M. Harry Caine.”

“What would ‘Office’ be?” Carella asked.

“Ame’s office.”

“And who’s Harry Caine?”

“I don’t know.”

Carella looked at the book again. For tonight, Friday, September fifteenth, Chadderton had written “Graham Palmer Hall, 8:30, Ame pickup 7:30.” For tomorrow, Saturday the sixteenth, he had written “C.J. at C.C. 12 Noon.”

“Who’s C.J.?” Carella asked, looking up.

“I don’t know,” Chloe said.

“How about C.C.? Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Would it be a person or a place?”

“I have no idea.”

“But you did know most of his friends and business acquaintances?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Were there any recent conversations or meetings with strangers?”

“Strangers?”

“People you didn’t know. Like this C.J., for example. Were there people whose names you didn’t recognize when they phoned? Or people you saw him with, who—”

“No, there was nobody like that.”

“Did anyone named C.J. ever phone here?”

“No.”

“Did your husband mention that he had a meeting with this C.J. tomorrow at noon?”

“No.”

“Mind if I take this with me?” Carella asked.

“Why do you need it?”

“I want to study it more closely, prepare a list of names, see if you can identify any of them for me. Would that be all right?”

“Yes, fine.”

“I’ll give you a receipt for the book.”

“Fine.”

“Mrs. Chadderton, when I spoke to Ambrose Harding earlier tonight, he mentioned that your husband’s songs — some of his songs — dealt with situations and perhaps personalities here in Diamondback. Is that true?”

“George wrote about anything that bothered him.”

“Would he have been associating lately with any of the people he wrote about? To gather material, or to—”

“You don’t have to do research to know what’s happening in Diamondback,” Chloe said. “All you need is eyes in your head.”

“When you say he wrote these songs—”

“He wrote the songs down before he sang them. I know that’s not what calypso used to be, people used to make them up right on the spot. But George wrote them all down beforehand.”

“The words and the music?”

“Just the words. In calypso, the melody’s almost always the same. There’re a dozen melody lines they use over and again. It’s the words that count.”

“Where did he write these words?”

“What do you mean where? Here in the apartment.”

“No, I meant...”

“Oh. In a notebook. A spiral notebook.”

“Do you have that notebook?”

“Yes, it’s in the bedroom, too.”

“Could I see it?”

“I suppose so,” she said, and rose wearily.

“I wonder if I could look through his closet, too,” Carella said.

“What for?”

“He was dressed distinctively tonight, the red pants and the yellow shirt. I was wondering...”

“That was for the gig. He always dressed that way for a gig.

“Same outfit?”

“No, different ones. But always colorful. He was singing calypso, he was trying to make people think of carnival time.”

“Could I see some of those other outfits?”

“I still don’t know why.”

“I’m trying to figure out whether anyone might have recognized him from the costume alone. It was raining very hard, you know, visibility...”

“Well, nobody would’ve seen the costume. He was wearing a raincoat over it.”

“Even so. Would it be all right?”

Chloe shrugged, and walked wordlessly out of the kitchen. The detectives followed her through the living room, and then into a bedroom furnished with a rumpled king-sized bed, a pair of night tables, a large mahogany dresser, and a standing floor lamp beside an easy chair. Chloe opened the top drawer of the dresser, rummaged among the handkerchiefs and socks there, and found a spiral notebook with a battered blue cover. She handed the book to Carella.

“Thank you,” he said, and immediately began leafing through the pages. There were penciled lyrics for what appeared to be a dozen or more songs. There were pages of doodles, apparently scrawled while Chadderton was awaiting inspiration. On one of the pages, doodled all across it in block lettering and script lettering alike, overlapping and crisscrossing, were the words “IN THE LIFE.” “What’s this?” Carella said, and showed the page to Chloe.

“I don’t know. Maybe a song title.”

“Did he sing anything called ‘In the Life’?”

“No, but maybe it’s just the idea for a song, just the title.”

“Do you know what that expression means?” Carella asked.

“Yes, I think so. It refers to criminals, doesn’t it? People in... well, in the criminal life.”

“Yes,” Carella said. “But your husband wasn’t associating with any criminals, was he?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“None of the pushers or prostitutes he wrote about?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“That’s a common expression among prostitutes,” Carella said. “In the life.”

Chloe said nothing.

“Is that the closet?” Carella asked.

“Yes, right there,” she said, gesturing with her head. Carella handed the spiral notebook to Meyer, and then opened the closet door. Chloe watched him as he began moving hangers and clothing. She watched him intently. He wondered if she realized he was not looking for any of the colorful costumes her husband had worn on his various gigs, but instead was looking for black boots, a black raincoat, and a black hat — preferably wet. “These are what he wore, huh?” he asked.

“Yes. He had them made for him by a woman on St. Sab’s.”

“Nice,” Carella said. Chloe was still watching him. He shoved aside several of the garments on their hangers, looked deeper into the closet.

“Mrs. Chadderton,” Meyer said, “can you tell us whether your husband seemed worried or depressed lately? Were there any unexplained absences, did he seem to have any inkling at all that his life was in danger?”

Searching the closet, hoping that his search appeared casual, Carella recognized that Meyer had buried his “unexplained absences” question in a heap of camouflaging debris, circling back to the matter of possible infidelity in a way that might not ruffle Chloe’s already substantially ruffled feathers. In the closet, there were several coats, none of them black and none of them wet. On the floor, a row of women’s high-heeled pumps, several pairs of men’s shoes, some low-heeled women’s walking shoes, and a pair of medium-heeled women’s boots — tan. Chloe had still not answered Meyer’s question. Her attention had focused on Carella again.

“Mrs. Chadderton?” Meyer said.

“No. He seemed the same as always,” she said. “What are you looking for?” she asked Carella abruptly. “A gun?”

“No, ma’am,” Carella said. “You don’t own a gun, do you?”

“This has got to be some kind of comedy act,” Chloe said, and stalked out of the bedroom. They followed her into the kitchen. She was standing by the refrigerator, weeping again.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said.

Neither of the detectives said anything.

“If you’re done here, I wish you’d leave,” she said.

“May I take the notebook with me?” Carella asked.

“Take it. Just go.”

“I’ll give you a receipt, ma’am, if you—”

“I don’t need a receipt,” she said, and burst into fresh tears.

“Ma’am...”

“Would you please go?” she said. “Would you please get the hell out of here?”

They left silently.

In the hallway outside, Meyer said, “We were clumsy.”

“We were worse than that,” Carella said.