Calypso

5

Carella hated mysteries.

In mysteries, there were never funerals or wakes. In mysteries, the victim got shot or stabbed or strangled or clubbed to death, and then was conveniently forgotten. In mysteries, a corpse was only a device to set an investigative pot boiling. In real life, the murder victim was a person, and this person usually had relatives or friends who arranged for a wake and a decent burial. The dead man, in keeping with tribal custom everywhere, was accorded the same respect and dignity he would have earned had he died peacefully in his sleep. He had once been a person, you see, and you do not sweep people under the rug just so a private eye can keep things moving along at a brisk clip.

The wake for George Chadderton was held in the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback. Further uptown, near Pettit Lane, a similar wake was being held for a young black hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins who’d been murdered the night before in Midtown South, while Carella was poring over Chadderton’s notebook. Carella did not know about the second murder. This was a very big city, and the Midtown South precinct was a good three miles from the Eight-Seven. The man who’d caught the squeal on the Hawkins murder was named Alex Leopold, a detective/third who’d been transferred from a Calm’s Point precinct three months earlier. He did not know Carella and had never worked with him. The two Homicide cops who’d put in their obligatory appearance at the scene of the second murder were not Monoghan and Monroe, who’d gone home to bed after leaving the scene of the Chadderton murder, but were instead a similar pair of dicks named Forbes and Phelps. Mandatory autopsies had been performed on both the Chadderton and Hawkins corpses, and recovered bullets had already been sent to the Ballistics Section. But two different men at Ballistics were working the two different cases, at microscopes not six feet from each other, and they had instructions only to report their findings to the two separate detectives working the two cases in different sections of Isola. There had been no witnesses to the second murder — no citizen eager to step forward and say that Clara Jean Hawkins had been slain by a tall, slender man or woman dressed entirely in black. At ten minutes to twelve that Saturday morning, September 16, as Carella approached the doors of the funeral home, neither he nor anyone else in the Police Department had the faintest notion that the murders might have been linked.

It was still raining. He was wearing a soggy trench coat and a soggier rain hat, and feeling very much the way he looked after only six hours of sleep on a cot in the precinct locker room. Chadderton’s notebook was in a sodden manila Police Department evidence envelope he carried under his arm. He had studied it till close to 5:00 A.M., and had found nothing in the lyrics that would point a finger at a possible murderer. From Chadderton’s appointment calendar, he had made a list of names he wanted to ask Chloe about. He intended to do that when he returned both books to her — with apologies for his behavior the night before. A call to the Medical Examiner’s Office this morning had informed Carella that Chadderton’s body had been picked up at the hospital at 8:00 A.M. for transfer to the funeral home on St. Sab’s. Presumably the body had by now been drained of its blood and the contents of its stomach, intestines, and bladder. Presumably, the mortician had already injected by trocar or tube a solution of formaldehyde that would cause coagulation of the body’s proteins. Presumably, the mortician had worked with wax and cosmetics to repair Chadderton’s shattered left cheekbone and disguise the gaping holes in his neck and the top of his skull. Carella wondered whether there would be an open coffin. Mourners usually chose to see their departed loved ones as sleeping peacefully; either that, or they chose not to view them at all.

The funeral director was a short, very dark black man who told Carella that the body would be ready for viewing at 2:00 P.M., in the Blue Chapel. He further informed Carella that Mrs. Chadderton had been there earlier today, to receive the body and to make all the arrangements, and had left at approximately 11:00 A.M. She had mentioned that she would not be back until five. Carella thanked the man, and stepped outside into the pouring rain again. He went back in a moment later, and asked if he might use the telephone. The man showed him into an office opposite the Pink Chapel. In the Isola directory, Carella found a listing for George C. Chadderton at 1137 Raucher Street. He dialed the number and let it ring twelve times. There was no answer. He could not imagine that Chloe Chadderton had gone to work on the day following her husband’s murder, but he looked up the number of the Club Flamingo, dialed it, and spoke to a woman who identified herself as one of the bartenders. She told him that Chloe was expected at twelve noon. He thanked her, hung up, jotted the club’s address into his notebook, and then went outside to where he’d parked his car. He had forgotten to close the window on the driver’s side, which he’d partially opened earlier to keep the windshield from fogging. The seat was soaking wet when he climbed inside.

Both plate-glass windows of the Club Flamingo were painted over pink. In the center of the window on the left was a huge hand-lettered sign advertising topless, bottomless, noon to 4:00 A.M. The club apparently offered more by way of spectacle than Chloe had revealed to him last night. “It’s a topless club,” she’d said, the difference between topless and bottomless being somewhat akin to that between Manslaughter and Murder One. In the other window was an equally large sign promising generous drinks, free lunch. Carella was hungry — he’d had only a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee for breakfast. He opened one of the two entrance doors and stepped into the club’s dim interior. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, he stood just inside the entrance doors, listening to the canned rock music that blared from speakers all around the room. Dead ahead was a long oval bar. Two girls, one on either side of the bar, were gyrating in time to the rock music. Both girls were wearing sequined, high-heeled, ankle-strapped pumps and fringed G-strings. Both girls were bare-breasted. Neither of them wore anything under the G-strings. Neither of them was Chloe Chadderton.

He noticed now that there were small tables around the perimeter of the room. The place was not very crowded. He suspected the rain was keeping customers away. But at one of the tables, a blond girl danced — if one could call it that — for the exclusive pleasure of a man who sat there alone, nursing a beer. There were four men sitting at the bar, two on each side of it, three of them white, one of them black. Carella took a seat midway down the bar. One of the bartenders — a young redheaded girl wearing a black leotard and black net stockings — walked to where he was sitting, her high-heeled pumps clicking on the hard wooden floor.

“Something to drink, sir?” she said.

“Have you got anything soft?” Carella asked.

“Oh, yes indeed,” she said, and rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, at once imparting sexual innuendo to his innocuous question. He looked at her. She figured she’d somehow made a mistake and immediately said, “Pepsi, Coke, Seven-Up, or ginger ale. It’ll cost you same as the whiskey, though.”

“How much is that?”

“Three-fifty. But that includes the lunch bar.”

“Coke or Pepsi, either one’s fine,” Carella said. “Has Chloe Chadderton come in yet?”

“She’s taking her break just now,” the redhead said, and then casually asked, “You a cop?”

“Yes,” Carella said, “I’m a cop.”

“Figures. Guy comes in here wanting an ice-cream soda, he’s got to be a cop on duty. What do you want with Chloe?”

“That’s between her and me, isn’t it?”

“This is a clean place, mister.”

“Nobody said it wasn’t.”

“Chloe dances same as the other girls. You won’t see nothing here you can’t see in any one of the legitimate theaters downtown. They got big stage shows downtown with nude dancers in them, same as here.”

“Mm-huh,” Carella said.

The redhead turned away, uncapped his soft drink, and poured it into a glass. “Nobody is allowed to touch the girls here. They just dance, period. Same as downtown. If it isn’t against the law in a legitimate theater, then it isn’t against the law here, either.”

“Relax,” Carella said. “I’m not looking for a bust.”

The girl rolled her eyes again. For a moment, he didn’t quite understand her reaction. And then he realized she was deliberately equating the police expression for “arrest” — a term he was certain she’d heard a hundred times before — with what was bursting exuberantly in the black leotard top. He looked at her again. She shrugged elaborately, turned away, and walked to the cash register at the end of the bar. One of the dancers was squatting before the solitary black customer now, her legs widespread, tossing aside the fringe of the G-string to reveal herself completely. The man stared at her exposed genitals. The girl smiled at him. She licked her lips. The man was wearing eyeglasses. The girl took the glasses from his eyes, and wiped them slowly over her opening, a mock expression of shocked propriety on her face. She returned the glasses to the man’s head, and then arched herself over backward, supporting herself with her arms, thrusting her open crotch toward his face, and pumping at him while he continued staring. Just like the legitimate theaters downtown, Carella thought.

The state’s obscenity laws were defined in Article 235, Section 2 of the Criminal Law, wherein “producing, presenting or directing an obscene performance or participating in a portion thereof which is obscene and contributes to its obscenity” was considered a Class-A misdemeanor. A related provision — PL 235.00, Subdivision 1 — stated: “Any material or performance is ‘obscene if (a) considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, excretion, sadism, or masochism, AND (b) it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in describing or representing such matters, AND (c) it is utterly without redeeming social value.”

There was no question in Carella’s mind but that the girl down the bar, her back arched, her own hand now toying with her vulva for the obvious pleasure of the man seated before her, was performing an act the predominant appeal of which was to a prurient interest in nudity and sex. But as the redheaded bartender had pointed out to him a moment ago, there wasn’t anything you could see here that you couldn’t see in some of the legitimate theaters downtown, provided you had a first-row seat. Make the bust, and you found yourself in endless courtroom squabbles about the difference between art and pornography, a thin line Carella himself — and even the Supreme Court of the United States — was quite unready to define.

When you thought about it — and he thought about it often — what the hell was so terrible about pornography, anyway? He had seen motion pictures rated “R” (no one under seventeen admitted unless in the company of an adult) or even “PG” (parental guidance advised) that he had found to be dirtier than any of the “X”-rated porn flicks running in the sleazy theaters along The Stem. The language in these socially acceptable films was identical to what he heard in the squadroom and on the streets every single waking day of his life — and he was a man whose job placed him in constant contact with the lowest elements of society. The sex in these approved films was equally candid, sparing an audience only the explicit intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus common in “X”-rated films. So where did you draw the line? If it was okay for a big-name male star to make simulated love to a totally naked woman in a multimillion-dollar epic (provided he kept his pants on), then why was it wrong to depict the actual sex act in a low-budget film starring unknowns? Put a serious actress up there on the screen, show her simulating the sex act (but, God forbid, never actually performing it), and somehow this became high cinema art while Deep Throat remained cheap porn. He guessed it was all in the camera angles. He guessed he was a cop who shouldn’t be wondering so often about the laws he was being paid to enforce.

But what if he walked down the length of the bar right this minute and busted the dancer there for “participating in an obscene performance” (screwing a man’s eyeglasses was certainly obscene, wasn’t it?) and then busted the owner of the joint for “producing, presenting or directing an obscene performance” — what then? The offense was a Class-A misdemeanor, punishable by not more than a year in jail or more than a thousand-dollar fine. Get your conviction (which was unlikely), and they’d be out on the street again in three months time. Meanwhile, there were killers, rapists, burglars, muggers, armed robbers, child molesters, and pushers roaming the city and victimizing the populace. So what was an honest cop to do? An honest cop sipped at his Pepsi or his Coca-Cola, whichever the redhead with the inventive pornographic mind had served him, and listened to the blaring rock, and watched the naked backside of the blond dancer across the bar as she leaned over to bring her enormous breasts to within an inch of a customer’s lips.

At twenty minutes to one, Chloe Chadderton — naked except for high-heeled shoes and a silvery fringed G-string — stepped up onto the bar at the far end of it. The dancer she was replacing, the one who’d wiped the black man’s glasses over what the Vice Squad would have called her “privates,” patted Chloe on the behind as she strutted past her and down the ramp leading off the bar top. A new rock record dropped into place on the turntable. Smiling broadly, Chloe began dancing to it, high-stepping down the bar past the black man with the steamy eyeglasses, shaking her naked breasts, thrusting her hips, bumping and grinding to the frantic rhythm of the canned guitars, and finally stopping directly in front of Carella. Still shaking wildly, she began kneeling before him, arms stretched above her head, fingers widespread, breasts quaking, knees opening — and suddenly recognized him. A look of shocked embarrassment crossed her face. The smile dropped from her mouth.

“I’ll talk to you during your next break,” Carella said.

Chloe nodded. She rose, listened for a moment to recapture the beat, and then swiveled long-leggedly to where the black man sat at the other end of the bar.

She danced for half an hour, and then came to the small table where Carella was eating the sandwich he’d made at the lunch bar. She explained at once that she had only a ten-minute break. Her embarrassment seemed to have passed. She was wearing a flimsy nylon wrapper belted at the waist, but she was still naked beneath it, and when she leaned over to rest her folded arms on the tabletop, he could see her breasts and nipples in the V-necked opening of the gown.

“I want to apologize for last night,” he said at once, and she opened her eyes wide in surprise. “I’m sorry. I was trying to touch all the bases, but I guess I slid into second with my cleats flying.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I mean it.”

“I said it’s okay. Did you look at George’s notebook?”

“Yes. I have it here with me,” he said, reaching under his chair to where he’d placed the manila envelope. “I didn’t find anything I can use. Would you mind if I asked you a few more questions?”

“Go ahead,” she said, and turned to look at the wall clock. “Just remember it’s a half hour on the bar, and a ten-minute break. They don’t pay me for sitting around talking to cops.”

“Do they know your husband was killed last night?”

“The boss knows, he read it in the newspaper. I don’t think any of the others do.”

“I was surprised you came to work today.”

“Got to eat,” Chloe said, and shrugged. “What did you want to ask me?”

“I’m going to start by getting you sore again,” he said, and smiled.

“Go ahead,” she said, but she did not return the smile.

“You lied about this place,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Did you lie about anything else?”

“Nothing.”

“Positive about that?”

“Positive.”

“Really no trouble between you and your husband? No unexplained absences on his part? No mysterious phone calls?”

“What makes you think there might have been?”

“I’m asking, that’s all.”

“No trouble between us. None at all,” she said.

“How about unexplained absences?”

“He was gone a lot of the time, but that had nothing to do with another woman.”

“What did it have to do with?”

“Business.”

“I jotted some names down,” Carella said, nodding. “Got them from his appointment calendar, people he had lunch with or meetings with in the past month, people he was scheduled to see in the next few weeks ahead. I wonder if you can identify them for me.”

“I’ll try,” Chloe said.

Carella opened his notebook, found the page he wanted, and began reading. “Buster Greerson,” he said.

“Saxophone player. He was trying to get George to join a band he’s putting together.”

“Lester... Handey, is it?”

“Hanley. He’s George’s vocal coach.”

“Okay, that explains the regularity. Once every two weeks, right?”

“Yes, on Tuesdays.”

“Hawkins. Who’s that?”

“I don’t know. What’s his first name?”

“No first name. Just Hawkins. Appears in the calendar for the first time on August tenth, that was a Thursday. Then again on August twenty-fourth, another Thursday.”

“I don’t know anybody named Hawkins.”

“How about Lou Davis?”

“He’s the man who owns Graham Palmer Hall. That’s where George—”

“Oh, sure,” Carella said, “how dumb.” He looked at his notebook again. “Jerri Lincoln.”

“Girl singer. Another one of George’s album ideas. He wanted to do a double with her. But that was a long time ago.

“Saw her on August thirtieth, according to his calendar.”

“Well, maybe she started bugging him again.”

“Just business between them?”

“You should see her,” Chloe said, and smiled. “Strictly business, believe me.”

“Don Latham,” Carella said.

“Head of a company called Latham Records. The label is Black Power.”

“C.J.,” Carella said. “Your husband saw him — or her,” he said, with a shrug,” on the thirty-first of August, and again on September seventh, and he was supposed to have lunch with whoever it is today — I guess it was going to be lunch — at twelve noon. Mean anything to you?”

“No, you asked me that last night.”

“C.J.,” Carella said again.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Okay, who’s Jimmy Talbot?”

“Don’t know him.”

“Davey... Kennemer, is it?”

“Kennemer, yes, he’s a trumpet player.”

“And Arthur Spessard?”

“Another musician, I forget what he plays.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Carella said, and closed the notebook. “Tell me about George’s brother,” he said abruptly.

“Santo? What do you want to know about him?”

“Is it true he ran away seven years ago?”

“Who told you that?”

“Ambrose Harding. Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“Ambrose said he may have gone back to Trinidad.”

“He didn’t go to Trinidad. George went there looking for him, and he wasn’t there.”

“Have any ideas where he might be?”

Chloe hesitated.

“Yes?” Carella said.

“George thought...”

“Yes, what?”

“That somebody killed his brother.”

“What made him think that?”

“The way it happened, the way he just disappeared from sight.”

“Did George mention any names? Anybody he suspected?”

“No. But he kept at it all the time. Wasn’t a day went by he wasn’t asking somebody or other about his brother.”

“Where’d he do the asking?”

“Everywhere.”

“In Diamondback?”

“In Diamondback, yes, but not only there. He was involved in a whole big private investigation. Police wouldn’t do nothing, so George went out on his own.”

“When you say his brother just disappeared, what do you mean?”

“After a job one night.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know what happened, exactly. Neither does anyone else, for that matter. It was after a job — they used to play in a band together, George and his brother.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“George and two other guys in the band were waiting in the van for Santo to come out. He’d gone to the men’s room or something, I’m not sure. Anyway, he never did come out. George went back inside the place, searched it top to bottom, couldn’t find him.”

“The other musicians who were there that night — would you know them?”

“I know their names, but I’ve never met them.”

“What are their names?”

“Freddie Bones and Vincent Barragan.”

“Bones? Is that his real name?”

“I think so.”

“How do you spell the other name?”

“I think it’s B-A-R-R-A-G-A-N. It’s a Spanish name, he’s from Puerto Rico.”

“But you’ve never met either of them?”

“No, they were both before my time. I’ve only been married to George for four years.”

“How do you happen to know the names then?”

“Well, he mentioned them a lot. Because they were there the night his brother disappeared, you know. And he was always talking to them on the phone.”

“Recently?”

“No, not recently.”

“Four years,” Carella said. “Then you never met George’s brother, either.”

“Never.”

“Santo Chadderton, is it?”

“Santo Chadderton, yes.”

“Is this your first marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Was it George’s?”

“No. He was married before.” She hesitated. “To a white woman,” she said, and looked him straight in the eye.

“Divorce her or what?”

“Divorced her, yes.”

“When?”

“Couple of months after we met. They were already separated when we met.”

“What’s her name, would you know?”

“Irene Chadderton. That’s if she’s still using her married name.”

“What was her maiden name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does she live here in the city?”

“Used to, I don’t know if she still does.”

“Would she have known Santo?”

“I suppose so.”

“Would she know anything about his disappearance?”

“Anybody who ever had anything to do with George knows about his brother’s disappearance, believe me. It was like a goddamn obsession with him. That’s the other thing we argued about, okay? My dancing here, and him talking about his brother all the time! Searching for him all the time, checking newspapers, and court records, and hospitals and driving everybody crazy.”

“You told me you had a good marriage,” Carella said flatly.

“It was good as most,” Chloe answered, and then shrugged. The flap of the gown slid away from one of her breasts with the motion, exposing it almost completely. She made no effort to close the gown. She stared into Carella’s eyes and said, “I didn’t kill him, Mr. Carella,” and then turned to look at the wall clock again. “I got to get back up there, my audience awaits,” she said breathlessly and smiled suddenly and radiantly.

“Don’t forget this,” Carella said, handing her the envelope.

“Thank you,” she said. “If you learn anything...”

“I have your number.”

“Yes,” she said, and nodded, and looked at him a moment longer and then turned to walk toward the bar. Carella put on his coat and hat — both still wet — and went to the register to pay his check. As he walked out of the place, he turned to look toward the bar again. Chloe was in the same position the other dancer had assumed less than forty-five minutes ago — back arched, elbows locked, legs widespread, furiously smiling and grinding at a customer sitting not a foot away from her crotch. As Carella pushed open the door to step into the rain, the customer slid a dollar bill into the waistband of her G-string.