Calypso

6

It was almost 2:00 P.M. when he got back to the squadroom and began hitting the phone books. There were no listings for either Irene Chadderton or Frederick Bones in any of the city’s five directories, but he found a listing for Vicente Manuel Barragan in the Calm’s Point book. He dialed Directory Assistance for further information, and was told by the operator that she had nothing at all for an Irene Chadderton anywhere in the city, and whereas she did have a listing for a Frederick Bones, it was an unpublished one. Carella identified himself as a working detective and she said, “This’ll have to be a call-back, sir.”

“Yes, I know that,” he said. “I’m at the 87th Precinct, the number here is Frederick 7-8024.”

He hung up and waited. He knew the operator would first check out the number he had given her to make certain he was indeed calling from a police station. She would then need permission from her supervisor before revealing Bones’s unpublished number — even to a cop. The phone rang ten minutes later. Carella picked it up. The operator gave him a number in Isola, and when he requested the address, she supplied that as well. He thanked her and walked over to where Meyer Meyer was telling a joke to Bert Kling, who sat in a swivel chair behind his desk, his feet up on the desk, listening with something akin to childlike anticipation. Kling was the youngest detective on the squad, a tall, blond, strapping kid (they thought of him as a kid even though he was in his early thirties) with guileless hazel eyes and an open face more suited to a beet farmer in Grand Forks, North Dakota, than a detective here in the big bad city. Carella caught only the punch line as he approached Kling’s desk — “I say, old boy, are you trying to escape?”

Kling and Meyer burst out laughing simultaneously. Meyer stood beside the desk looking at Kling and laughing at his own joke, and Kling sat there in his chair, his feet on the floor now, laughing so hard Carella thought he would wet his pants. Both men laughed for what seemed a solid three minutes, though it was surely only thirty or forty seconds. Carella stood by, waiting. When Meyer stopped laughing at last, he handed him the sheet of paper on which he had listed the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Frederick Bones and Vicente Manuel Barragan.

“What we’re looking for,” he said, “is information on what happened the night Santo disappeared, seven years ago.”

“You think somebody really did him in?” Meyer asked.

“His brother thought so, that’s for sure. Conducted a one-man investigation all over the city, even went back to Trinidad looking for him. If somebody really did knock off the kid...”

“And if George was getting close to who did it...”

“Right,” Carella said. “So let’s find out what happened back then, okay? Which one do you want?”

“They sound like a vaudeville team,” Meyer said. “Barragan and Bones.”

“I’ll flip you,” Carella said.

“Not with your coin,” Meyer said. “If we flip, we use a neutral coin.”

“My coin is neutral,” Carella said.

“No, your coin is crooked. He has a crooked coin, kid.”

“I say, old boy, are you trying to escape?” Kling said, and began laughing again.

“Have you got a quarter?” Carella asked him.

Still laughing, Kling reached into his pocket. Carella accepted the coin, examined both sides of it, and handed it to Meyer for his approval.

“Okay,” Meyer said, “heads or tails?”

“Heads,” Carella said.

Meyer flipped the coin. It hit the corner of Kling’s desk, flew off it at an angle, struck the floor on its edge and went rolling across the room to collide with the wall behind the water cooler. Carella and Meyer both ran across the room. Squatting near the cooler, they examined the coin.

“It’s tails,” Meyer said triumphantly.

“Okay, you get the vaudeville performer of your choice,” Carella said.

“Barragan’s way the hell out in Calm’s Point,” Meyer said. “I’ll take Bones.”

Some days you can’t make a nickel.

Frederick Bones’s address was indeed 687 Downes, which was in the heart (or perhaps the kidney) of Isola and only a fifteen-minute subway ride from the station house. Meyer drove the distance downtown in his beat-up old Chevy, his wife, Sarah, enjoying the rights to the family’s second car, a used Mercedes-Benz. Meyer knew exactly what his father (rest his soul) would have said if he’d lived to see the car: “Are you buying from the Germans already? What kind of Jew are you?” Meyer sometimes wondered.

He had no such doubts about what kind of Jew his father Max had been. His father Max had been a comical Jew. It was Max who’d decided to send his only son through life with a double-barreled moniker — Meyer Meyer, very funny, Pop. “Meyer Meyer, Jew on Fire,” the kids used to call him when he was growing up in a neighborhood that was almost exclusively Gentile. He kept trying to think of clever taunts with which he might counterattack. Somehow, “Dominick Rizzo, Full of Shitzo,” did not do the trick, especially since it only caused Dominick to come after him with a baseball bat the very same day Meyer had his poetic inspiration, occasioning the taking of six stitches at the right side of Meyer’s head in order to keep his ear from falling off. “Patrick Cassidy, Kiss My Assidy” resulted in fifteen-year-old, two-hundred-pound Patrick chasing twelve-year-old, one-hundred-and-twenty-pound Meyer for eight blocks before he caught him, whereupon Patrick lowered his trousers, flashed a huge harvest moon, and ordered Meyer to kiss it unless he wanted a broken Hebe head. Meyer bit Patrick on the ass instead, an unprovoked and inconsiderate attack that contributed little toward relieving Judeo-Hibernian tensions. When Meyer got home later that afternoon, he washed his mouth out with Listerine, but the taste of Patrick’s Irish ass lingered and did not improve the taste of his mother’s fine kneydls. At the dinner table that night, his comical father Max told a joke about an Italian sewer worker who complained about taking shit from a Jew.

It was not until Meyer got to be sixteen years old and five feet eleven and three-quarter inches tall that the kids in the neighborhood stopped calling him names. He had begun lifting weights by then, and when he wasn’t pumping iron, he was pumping gas at the local service station and wishing he would hurry up and gain the extra quarter of an inch that would make him a six-footer. He figured that once he got to be six feet tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, he would grab Dominick and Patrick by the scruffs of their necks and bang their heads together. He was so busy measuring himself that he didn’t notice the name calling had stopped. Dominick Rizzo joined the navy and got killed in the war. Patrick Cassidy became a cop. It was Patrick, in fact, who talked Meyer into quitting law school and becoming a cop himself. Patrick was now a deputy inspector temporarily assigned to the DA’s office and investigating organized crime. Whenever he ran across Meyer, he asked him if he wanted to see the teeth marks that were still on his behind. Meyer always felt uncomfortable in his presence. But he did not feel guilty about having bought the Mercedes.

He parked the Chevy a block from Bones’s apartment building — the closest spot he could find — and then walked through the pouring rain toward 687 Downes, a tidy-looking brownstone in a row of similarly tidy-looking buildings. In the lobby, he looked for a mailbox marked with Bones’s name, found none, and rang the bell marked super. A white man in his late fifties opened the inner lobby door. Meyer showed his shield and his identification card, and told the man he was looking for Frederick Bones.

“Freddie Bones, huh?” the super said. “You just missed him.”

“By how long?” Meyer asked.

“By three months!” the super said, and burst out laughing. His teeth were tobacco stained, he was sporting a grizzled three-day-old beard on his cheeks and his chin. He cackled loudly in the hallway and seemed amazed that Meyer was not sharing his amusement.

“Moved away, did he?” Meyer asked.

“Got sent away,” the super said, and burst out laughing again.

“Sent where?” Meyer asked.

“Castleview, upstate.”

“The prison?”

“The prison, right enough,” the super said.

“Shit,” Meyer said.

The neighborhood in which Vicente Manuel Barragan lived had until as recently as five years ago been an Italian ghetto, but it was now almost exclusively Hispanic, and the neon signs that blistered the falling rain announced BODEGA and CARNICERÍA and JOYERÍA and SASTRERÍA. Patterson Boulevard was a wide avenue with a tree-planted divider running up the middle of it. The trees had not yet begun to turn; the leaves hung limp and green in the downpour. Beneath the trees, patches of grass sprang up between the tightly spaced cobblestones that paved the divider. The avenue itself had once been paved with cobblestones, but it had been resurfaced with asphalt, and the blacktop glistened in the rain, reflecting the glow of the street lamps, already illuminated in defense against the 3:00 P.M. gloom. The traffic light on the corner turned from red to green, and the blacktop echoed the change, a shimmering green ball suddenly appearing in the road ahead. Carella found a space across the street from 2557, thanked his lucky stars, turned down the visor to which was rubber-banded a hand-lettered sign announcing police officer on duty, and then got out of the car, remembering to close the window this time. In the pouring rain, he ran across the street to Barragan’s building, raced up the front-stoop steps two at a time, threw open the glass-paneled entrance door, and stepped inside to a small foyer lined with brass mailboxes. A black plastic inset under one of the mailboxes told him that BARRAGAN was in Apartment 3C. He rang the bell, and then reached for the knob on the inner lobby door just as an answering buzz sounded.

The building was spotlessly clean. A blue-and-white-tiled inner lobby, walls newly painted a muted blue, light bulbs in all the wall sconces, not a trace of graffiti anywhere. The steps smelled of Lysol. He took them up to the third floor, and heard the sound of someone playing a woodwind instrument — clarinet or flute, he could not tell at first — as he came down the hallway to Apartment 3C. The music was coming from inside the apartment, a flute he guessed now. He rang the bell and the music stopped in mid-passage.

“Who is it?” a man called.

“Police,” he answered.

“Police?” the man said. “What the hell?”

Carella heard footsteps approaching the door. The door did not open. Instead, the peephole flap rattled back, and the man said from within, “Let me see your badge, please.”

Carella flashed the tin.

“Okay,” the man said. The peephole flap fell back into place. Carella heard the lock click open. The door itself opened a moment later.

“Mr. Barragan?”

“That’s me,” the man said. He was a light-skinned Hispanic with a heavy black mustache under his aquiline nose, thick black hair styled to fall softly over his forehead and ears, dark brown eyes that studied Carella with curiosity now. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“No trouble,” Carella said. “I’m investigating a homicide, and I thought you might be able to help me. All right if I come in?”

Barragan looked at him. “Is this about Georgie?” he asked.

“Yes. You know he was killed then?”

“I read about it in the paper. Come on in,” Barragan said, and stepped aside to let Carella by. Beyond the entrance foyer, Carella could see an open arch leading into a kitchen, another arch leading to a living room. A music stand was set up in the center of the living room, a straight-backed chair behind it. On the seat of the chair, Carella saw a flute — he’d been right about that.

“You want a beer or anything?” Barragan asked.

“Not allowed,” Carella said, “but thanks.”

“Mind if I have one? I’ve been practicing the past three hours, my throat’s kinda dry.”

“No, go right ahead,” Carella said.

He waited in the foyer. In the kitchen, he saw Barragan opening first the refrigerator door, and then a can of beer. When he came back into the foyer again, he was carrying the beer can in one hand and a glass in the other. Together, they went into the living room and sat side by side on the couch. Through the large rain-streaked living room windows, Carella could see in the distance the elevated Calm’s Point Expressway, bustling with traffic that edged slowly through the heavy rain.

Barragan poured beer into his glass, took a deep swallow, said, “Ahhh, good,” and then put the can on the floor, and began sipping more leisurely from the glass. “What do you want to know?” he said.

“You played in a band years ago with George and—”

“Yes, I did,” Barragan said.

“—and his brother Santo, is that right?”

“Santo, yeah. He played bongos. We had Georgie on guitar, me on flute, Santo on bongos, and a guy named Freddie Bones on the steel drum. That’s his real name, Freddie Bones. Black guy from Jamaica. It wasn’t such a bad combo. I heard worse,” Barragan said, and smiled. His teeth looked startlingly white under the thick black mustache.

“I want to know what happened seven years ago,” Carella said.

“When Santo split, do you mean?”

“Did he split? Or did something happen to him?”

“Who knows?” Barragan said, and shrugged. “I’m assuming he split of his own accord. I mean, Georgie checked with the police later, and there was no kind of report about anything happening to Santo, so I figure he just decided to go, and he went.”

“Where?” Carella said.

“I don’t know where. California? Mexico? Europe? Who knows where somebody goes when he decides to go?”

“Why’d he decide to go?”

“Same reason the band broke up later.”

“What was that?”

“Too much star power. Too much Georgie Chadderton. I hate to speak bad about the dead, but the man was a pain in the ass, you dig? A full-time ego trip. Thought the rest of us were there just to make him look good. I mean, shit, man, I’m a fair flute player, and Freddie was terrific on that steel drum, he could make that thing sound like a fuckin orchestra. So Georgie takes all the solos. On a guitar, no less. Like, man, unless you’re really outstanding on the guitar, all it’s good for is laying down chords for instruments that can run the melody line. You find very few guitar players can do justice to a melody. So here’s a band with a flute and a steel drum in it — now what are those two instruments for, huh, man? For melody, am I right? Well, Georgie had us playing riffs behind his half-ass guitar stuff. Whang, whang, whang, and behind him is me doing tootle-ee-oo-doo over and over, and Freddie hitting two-note chords on the steel drum. For the birds, man. We finally had enough of it.”

“When was this? When did the band break up?”

“A year after Santo split, I guess it was.”

“Tell me what happened that night.”

“That was a long time ago, man. I’m not sure I can remember it all.”

“As much as you can remember,” Carella said. “First of all, when was it, exactly? Can you remember the date?”

“Sometime in September,” Barragan said. “A Saturday night the first or second week in September, I’m not sure.”

“All right, go ahead.”

“It was raining, I remember that. The band used to have this VW van we traveled in, maroon and white, we used to take it everywhere we played. The gig that night—”

“Who owned the van?”

“We all did. We chipped in for it. When the band broke up, Freddie bought us out.”

“Sorry, go ahead.”

“Like I said, it was raining very hard that night. The gig was at the Hotel Palomar in Isola — downtown, you know the place? Near the Palomar Theater? Very big hotel, very classy affair. We were the relief band, we were playing a lot of Latin shit in those days, rumbas, sambas, cha-chas, the whole bag. This was before Georgie got on his calypso trip. The other band — I forget the name of it — Archie Cooper? Artie Cooper? Something like that. Big band, ten or twelve pieces. This was a big fancy-dress ball — costumes, you know? A benefit of some kind, I forget now what it was — multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy, one of the two. Georgie got us the relief gig through a guy playing second trumpet on the Cooper band — Archie was it? Arnie? Georgie’d done the horn man some favors a while back, and when the kid heard they needed a Latin band as relief, he thought of Georgie and gave him a ring. It was a good gig. We used to play some good gigs when we were together. Well, like I told you, I’ve heard worse bands.”

The rain lashed the living room windows. Carella kept staring at the dissolving panes of glass, listening to Barragan as he told now about the rain on the night seven years ago, rain coming down in buckets as the musicians, the gig over, their instruments packed, ran for the parked VW van at two-thirty in the morning, Freddie Bones with a newspaper tented over his head, his steel drum hanging from a strap on his left shoulder and banging against his hip as he ran through the rain, Georgie cursing and complaining that his new guitar case would get wet, Barragan himself laughing and running, slipping and almost falling, his flute case tucked under his raincoat to protect it. He was the one who slid open the door of the van, he was the one who climbed in first, George getting in behind the wheel and still complaining about the rain. Bones lighted a cigarette. Georgie started the engine, and then wiped off the windshield with his gloved hand, and looked toward the revolving doors at the front of the hotel, where men and women were coming out under the canopy and looking for taxis. “Where’s Santo?” Georgie said, and the three of them looked at each other, and Barragan said, “He was right behind me when we came out of the John,” and Georgie said, “So where’s he now?” and wiped the windshield again, and again looked toward the revolving doors. “He’ll be here in a minute,” Bones said. “Calm down, why don’t you? You’re always up there on the ceiling someplace.”

They waited another ten minutes, and then Georgie got out of the van and went back into the hotel to look for his brother. He himself was gone for ten minutes before Barragan and Bones decided to go inside to look for him. “This fuckin hotel is swallowing up the whole Chadderton family tonight,” Bones said, and both men laughed and went through the revolving doors, and then upstairs to what was called the Stardust Ballroom, which wasn’t the Grand Ballroom, but a smaller ballroom on the mezzanine floor of the hotel. There were still some guests around, laughing and talking, but most of them had split when the musicians began packing. Barragan and Bones went into the ballroom, and talked to a sax player on the Cooper band — Harvey Cooper, that was it! — and asked him if he’d seen Georgie around, and he said last he’d seen of Georgie was him going into the men’s room down the hall. So they went down the hall to the men’s room, Bones making a crack about maybe both Santo and Georgie having fallen in, and Barragan laughed, and they pushed open the door to the men’s room, but Georgie wasn’t in there, and neither was Santo. They found Georgie outside the hotel’s side entrance, talking to the doorman there, asking him about Santo. The doorman hadn’t seen anybody come out carrying a set of bongo drums. George described his brother. The doorman hadn’t seen anybody answering that description, either.

“What did he look like?” Carella asked.

“Santo? Good-looking kid, even lighter skinned than his brother, black hair, sort of amber-colored eyes.”

“How tall?” Carella asked, writing.

“Five nine, five ten, around there.”

“Can you make a guess at his weight?”

“Sort of skinny kid. Well, not skinny. Slender, I guess you’d call it. Muscular, you know, but slender. Sinewy, I guess you’d say. Yeah.”

“How old was he then, do you know?”

“Seventeen. He was just a kid.”

“That would make him twenty-four now,” Carella said.

“If he’s alive,” Barragan said.

Even driving as hard as he could through the torrential rain, Meyer did not get to Rawley, upstate, until a little after 6:00 P.M. He had phoned ahead first to verify that a man named Frederick Bones was indeed a prisoner at Castleview there, and then had phoned Sarah to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner. Sarah sighed. Sarah was used to him not being home for dinner.

Castleview State Penitentiary was situated on a point of land jutting out into the River Harb, a natural peninsula dominated by the gray stone walls that crowded the land to its banks on all three sides. A concrete foundation some thirty feet high slanted into the water itself, creating the image of a fairy-tale castle surrounded by a moat. There were eight guard towers on the walls — one at each corner of the prison’s narrow end, two spaced along each of the walls angling back toward the main gate, and another at each corner of the wall fronting the approach drive. The massive main gate was constructed of solid steel four inches thick. Meyer rang the bell alongside it, and a panel in the gate opened.

“Detective Meyer, 87th Precinct,” he said to the face behind the bars. “I called earlier. I’ve got an appointment to talk with one of your inmates.”

“Let’s see your I.D.,” the guard said.

Meyer showed him his shield and his Lucite-encased I.D. card. The panel slammed shut. There was the sound of a bar being thrown back, and then the sound of heavy tumblers falling. The gate opened. Meyer found himself in a small entrance courtyard, walls on either side of him, a steel-barred inner gate directly ahead of him. The guard told him he’d picked a bad time for a visit; the men were at dinner. Which is where I should be, Meyer thought, but did not say. He asked instead if he could look at Bones’s records while he waited for the dinner hour to end. The guard nodded curtly, picked up a phone hanging on the wall just inside the entrance door, spoke briefly to someone on the other end, and then went back to reading his girlie magazine. In several moments, a second guard approached the barred inner gate, unlocked it, slid it open, and asked, “You the detective wants to see somebody’s record?”

“That’s me,” Meyer said.

“You picked a hell of a time to come up here,” the second guard said. “We had a prisoner got stabbed in the yard yesterday.”

“Sorry,” Meyer said.

“No sorrier’n he is,” the guard said. “Well, come on.”

He let Meyer into the yard, and then locked the gate behind him. The prison walls loomed enormous around them as they walked through the rain to a building on their left. In the guard towers, Meyer could see the muzzles of machine guns pointing down at the yard. He had lots of friend here, Meyer did — or rather business associates, so to speak. All part of the game, he thought. The good guys and the bad guys. Sometimes, he wondered which were which. Take a cop like Andy Parker...

“In here,” the guard said. “Records is down the hall. Who you interested in?”

“Man named Freddie Bones.”

“Don’t know him,” the guard said, and shook his head. “Is that his straight handle?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t know him. Just down the hall there,” he said, pointing. “Dinner’s over at seven. You want to talk to this guy, you’ll have to do it then. They get pissed off if they miss their television shows.”

“Who do I see after I’m through here?” Meyer asked.

“Assistant Warden’s office is around the corner from Records. I don’t know who’s got the duty right now, just talk to whoever’s in there.”

“Thanks,” Meyer said.

“Got him with an ice pick,” the guard said. “Fourteen holes in his chest. Nice, huh?” he said, and left Meyer in the corridor.

The clerk in Records was reluctant to open the prison files without a written order authorizing him to do so. Meyer explained that he was investigating a homicide, and that it might be helpful for him to know something of Bones’s background before actually talking to the man. The clerk still seemed unconvinced. He made a brief phone call to someone, and then hung up and said, “It’s okay, I guess.” He found Bones’s folder in a battered file drawer that had seen far better days, and made Meyer comfortable at a small desk in one corner of the office. The folder was as brief as the clerk’s phone call had been. This was Bones’s first offense. He had been convicted for “the unlawful sale of one ounce or more of any narcotic” (the narcotic having been heroin in his case), an A-1 felony, which — under the terms of the state’s stringent hard-drug laws — could have grossed him from fifteen years to life in prison. Plea bargaining, which was permitted only within the A-felony class, had netted him ten. He could be paroled in three and a half, but that would be a lifetime parole; spit on the sidewalk or pass a traffic light, and he’d be right back behind bars again.

Meyer finished his homework and looked at his watch. It was a quarter past six. He carried the folder back to where the clerk was busily typing something no doubt important. The clerk did not look up. Meyer stood by his desk, the folder in his hand. The clerk kept typing. Meyer cleared his throat.

“You finished?” the clerk said.

“Yes, thank you,” Meyer said. “Any place I can get a sandwich and something to drink?”

“You mean inside the walls?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a swing room across the yard. Show the tin and they’ll let you in.”

“Thanks,” Meyer said.

He left Records, stopped in at the Assistant Warden’s office to tell him he was here and ready to talk to Bones, and made arrangements for him to be brought into the Visitors’ Room at seven sharp. The guards’ swing room across the yard was equipped with machines serving up sandwiches and soft drinks. Meyer bought himself an orange crush and a ham on rye. He wondered what his father would have said about the ham. The guards were talking about nothing but the inmate who’d had his chest ventilated the day before. Meyer guessed things were tough all over, inside or out.

At five minutes to seven, he went over to the Visitors’ Room, and was admitted by a guard, who asked him to take a seat on one side of the long table that ran the length of the room. At seven on the dot, a tall, extremely handsome black man in prison threads came into the room and took a seat opposite Meyer at the long table. They were separated by a sheet of clear plastic three inches thick; Meyer had heard someplace that the plastic was the same sort used in the gun turrets of bombers during World War II. There were telephones before both men on their separate sides of the table. Each carrel was separated from the one on either side of it by soundproof dividers that granted at least a modicum of privacy to visitors and inmates. A sign on the wall advised that visiting hours ended at 5:00 P.M. and asked that visits be limited to fifteen minutes. The room was empty now, save for Meyer and the man who sat opposite him. Meyer picked up his telephone.

“Mr. Bones?” he said, feeling very much like a straight man in a minstrel show.

“What’d I do this time?” Bones asked into his phone. He smiled as he asked the question, and Meyer unconsciously returned the smile.

“Nothing that I know of,” he said. He took out a small leather case, allowed it to fall open over his shield, and held the shield up to the plastic divider. “I’m Detective Meyer of the 87th Precinct in Isola. We’re investigating a homicide, and I thought you might be able to give me some information.”

“Who got killed?” Bones asked. He was no longer smiling.

“George Chadderton,” Meyer said.

Bones merely nodded.

“You don’t seemed surprised,” Meyer said.

“I ain’t surprised, no,” Bones said.

“How good is your memory?” Meyer asked.

“Fair.”

“Does it go back seven years?”

“It goes back thirty,” Bones said.

“I want to know what happened the night Santo disappeared.”

“Who says he disappeared?”

“Didn’t he?”

“He split, that’s all,” Bones said, and shrugged.

“And hasn’t been heard from since.”

Bones shrugged again.

“What happened, do you remember?”

Bones began remembering. As far as Meyer could tell, he was remembering in great detail and with a maximum of accuracy. It was not until several hours later — when Meyer compared notes with Carella on the telephone — that he recognized that Bones’s story was not without its inconsistencies. In fact, there were only two congruent points between the story Barragan had told Carella and the one Bones told Meyer; both men agreed that George C. Chadderton was an egotistical prick, and both men agreed it had been raining on the night Santo Chadderton disappeared. As for the rest—

Bones remembered the job as having taken place at the Hotel Shalimar in downtown Isola, a hostelry every bit as palatial as the hotel Barragan remembered, but some ten blocks distant from it and on the north side of the city as opposed to the south. Meyer, listening to Bones, not yet knowing that Barragan had pinpointed the hotel as the Palomar, jotted into his notebook “Hotel Shalimar,” and then asked, “When was this exactly, can you give me some idea?”

“October,” Bones said. “Sometime the middle of October.”

Later that night, Meyer would learn that Barragan had recalled the date as “Sometime in September. A Saturday night the first or second week in September.” For now, blissful in his ignorance, Meyer simply nodded and said, “Yes, go on, I’m listening,” and indeed did listen very carefully to every word Bones uttered, and faithfully transcribed each of those words into his notebook, the better to point up later the frailties of eyewitnesses even if they don’t happen to be in a Japanese movie.

The job, according to Bones, was a wedding job. Two society families, he couldn’t remember the names. But the groom had just got out of medical school, Dr. Somebody — wait a minute, Bones would get it in a minute — Dr. Coolidge, was it? He was sure the kid was a doctor, there were a lot of doctors at the wedding that night, Cooper, that was it. Dr. Harvey Cooper! Everybody in tuxedos and long gowns, a real swanky affair with good-looking guys and gorgeous broads — especially one blonde who kept hanging around the bandstand all night long, giving Santo the eye. According to Bones, the blonde — who had not so much as put in a bit-appearance in Barragan’s story — was one of those tall, healthy-looking, full-breasted, long-legged women he always associated with California. Man, the women out there were enough to drive a man out of his gourd, especially if the man happened to be a musician, which Bones happened to be. He could remember one time, this was after the Chadderton band broke up, he was doing a series of one-nighters on the Pacific coast, from the Mexican border all the way up to—

Meyer said he hated to interrupt, but he wanted to get back to the city at a decent hour, and also he didn’t want to cut in on Bones’s television viewing, which he understood—

“No, that’s okay,” Bones said, “television stinks anyway, all cops-and-robbers shit,” and went on to conclude his story about this woman he’d met in Pasadena, big tennis-playing California-type woman, long legs and great tits, pearly white teeth, took her to his room back at the motel, showed her how a black man aces a serve in there, yessir, showed her a few little tricks she hadn’t picked up out there on the coast.

“Well, that’s fine,” Meyer said, “but about Santo—”

“I’m only saying,” Bones said, “that there’s a certain kind of woman can easily be classified as a California woman, do you dig?”

“I dig,” Meyer said.

“It’s a type, man, you fathom me?”

“I fathom you,” Meyer said. “You’re saying this woman who was hanging around the bandstand that night was a California type, I get you. Blonde and tall and—”

“Big titted.”

“Yes, and long legged.”

“Right, and lots of white teeth. California, man. That’s what that is, man, a California type. Do you understand me now?”

“Yes, I do,” Meyer said. “So what happened with this woman? You wouldn’t remember her name, would you?”

“Her name was Margaret Henderson, she was married to a man named Thomas Henderson, who happened to be chairman of the dance they were throwing at the tennis club out there, where Margaret had won the women’s singles.”

“That’s in Pasadena, you mean.”

“Yeah. Margaret Henderson. Big tall blonde lady with gorgeous gams and the biggest set of—”

“I meant the one here at the Shalimar.”

“No, not as big as Margaret’s. Nice, you understand, full, very nice — but not like Margaret’s.”

“I meant her name,” Meyer said.

“Oh. No, I wouldn’t know her name. It was Santo who spent all the time with her.”

Bones went on to say that the way Santo had spent his time with the mysterious blonde lady who had no name was by dancing very close to her while the relief band (Bones seemed to think the other band was the relief band, whereas Barragan believed just the opposite) played these very slow tunes that could put a person to sleep. Didn’t put Santo to sleep, though, not with this gorgeous California-type no-name lady in his arms dressed all in white, slinky white satin gown slit almost to the thighs, suntanned tennis-player legs showing on both sides of the gown, gold bracelets on her arms, flashing those white teeth at him, long blond hair falling to her naked shoulders, sweet California lady, mmm, sweet.

“Man, she had him in her spell from minute number one,” Bones said.

“What do you mean?” Meyer asked.

“Dragging him around the floor like he was hypnotized.”

“Uh-huh,” Meyer said, and looked up from his notebook. “Did he ever leave the ballroom with her? Where was this, anyway?”

“The Hotel Shalimar, I told you.”

“Yes, I know, but any particular ballroom?”

“The Moonglow Ballroom.”

“Did he ever leave with her? Did you see him leaving with her?”

“Once. Well, let me correct that, man. I didn’t see him leaving with her, but I saw him outside with her.”

“Outside where?”

“In the hallway outside. I was going to the men’s room, and I saw Santo and the blonde coming up the stairs.”

“From where?”

“From the floor downstairs, I guess,” Bones said, and shrugged.

“When you say he looked hypnotized—”

“That was just an expression.”

“You weren’t suggesting—”

“Dope?” Bones said.

“Dope, yes.”

“I don’t think Santo was doing dope.”

“Not even a little pot every now and then?”

“No,” Bones said, “I don’t think so. Not Santo. No, definitely not. He respected his body too much. Whenever we had a rehearsal — we used to rehearse in the basement of the First Episcopal in Diamondback — Santo used to go in the ladies’ room and—”

“The ladies’ room?”

“Yeah, cause there was a mirror in there, a full-length mirror. There were mirrors in the men’s room, too, you understand, but they were over the sinks, and Santo wanted to see his gorgeous body in full living color, you dig?”

“Yes, mm, I dig,” Meyer said. “So he went in the ladies’ room, right?”

“Well, there was no danger of anybody walking in on him. I mean, we were down there all alone, rehearsing. This was in the basement of the church, you fathom, man?”

“I fathom. What was he, a weight lifter or something?”

“How’d you guess? Wait a minute, you done some lifting yourself, didn’t you?”

“Once upon a time,” Meyer said.

“Did you used to go in the ladies’ room and admire yourself?”

“No, not the ladies’ room.”

“You look pretty good for a man your age,” Bones said. “How old are you, anyway?”

Meyer was reluctant to tell Bones how old he really was because then he’d have to explain further that bald-headed men sometimes took on an appearance that belied their true youthfulness, sometimes in fact appeared stodgy and stuffy when their hearts were really in the highlands — and then he remembered that he had not taken off his Professor Higgins hat. It was still sitting there on top of his head, hiding his baldness and causing him to wonder what else there was about him that might prompt a casual observer to refer to him as “a man your age.”

He decided to ignore Bones’s question, decided also to sidestep any further discussion of those days when he was but a mere lad pumping iron in his bedroom, lest some inadvertent clue — like mentioning the emperor’s name, for example, or making reference to the chariot races that week — would enable Bones to pinpoint his decrepitude more precisely. Instead, and solely because a femme fatale now seemed to have entered the picture in a very healthy, long-legged, full-breasted California-type way, and seemed to have cast a spell upon Santo the moment she slithered across the floor of the Moonglow Ballroom to perch herself upon his shoulder as he bonged his bongos, Meyer asked the question that — properly answered — might at least have brought up the curtain on the three-act drama known as Santo’s Disappearance (to be retitled Rashomon as soon as Meyer compared notes with Carella), and the question was this:

“Tell me, Mr. Bones, is it possible that Santo left the hotel with this woman? After the job, I mean? Is it possible he simply left with her?”

Anything was possible, of course, but the question — on the face of it — was patently absurd. If Bones had seen Santo leaving the hotel with the mysterious blonde (who would become even more mysterious later on when Carella revealed that Barragan hadn’t once mentioned her), if indeed Bones had even the faintest suspicion that Santo and the blonde had vanished into the stormy night together, under the same umbrella perhaps, why wouldn’t he have mentioned this to the late George C. Chadderton? And wouldn’t this noble gentleman (a prick, according to Barragan and Bones alike) then have limited his search to only those ladies of California-type, long-legged, big-breasted persuasion? Of course. Even recognizing this, Meyer waited breathlessly for Bones’s answer.

“Yes,” Bones said, “I think that’s exactly what happened.”

“Would you elaborate on that?” Meyer said.

“I think he split with her.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know what,” Bones said.

“When’s the last time you saw him?” Meyer said.

“During the last set.”

“Then what?”

“He went down the hall with Vinnie.”

“Vinnie?”

“Vinnie Barragan.”

“By down the hall...”

“To take a leak,” Bones said.

“Then what?”

“Georgie and me packed up and went downstairs to wait for them.”

“Where’d you wait?”

“Under the canopy there. The hotel canopy.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“We saw Vinnie coming out of the elevator, so we started running for the van. Coupla minutes later, Vinnie came over to the van, but there was no Santo with him. So we go back in the hotel looking for him, but he’s gone.”

“And you think he left with the blonde, is that it?”

“Isn’t that what you’da done, man?”

“Well,” Meyer said, and let the word dangle. He frankly did not know what he might have done had a beautiful blonde in a slinky white gown come around casting spells on him, but he sure as hell knew what his wife Sarah would have done if ever she’d spotted him leaving the Hotel Shalimar or any hotel with such a blonde on his arm. Within minutes, the cops of Midtown North would have been investigating the strange and baffling death of a bald-headed detective whose skull had been crushed by a stale bagel. “Did you mention this to George?” he said. “That his brother might have left with the blonde?”

“Nope,” Bones said.

“How come?”

“Fuck him,” Bones said, summing up quite simply how he’d felt about the late George C. Chadderton.

“This blonde,” Meyer said, “I wonder if you can describe her a bit more fully.”

“Gorgeous,” Bones said.

“How tall would you say she was?”

“Five ten at least,” Bones said.

“How old was she?”

“At first I’d have said her twenties, but I think she may have been older than that. Her early thirties, I’d say.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You can tell by the way a chick carries herself, you dig? This one was older. Maybe thirty, maybe even a little older than that. Healthy, you understand, all these California types are healthy as hell, man, they can fool you with all that healthiness, you can think they’re twenty when they’re really fifty.”

“But this woman looked to be in her thirties, is that right?”

“No, she carried herself that way.”

“I don’t understand,” Meyer said, puzzled. “Did she look thirty, or did she...?”

“Well, how would I know how she looked, man?”

Meyer blinked. “What do you mean?” he said.

“She was wearing a mask,” Bones said.

“A mask?” Meyer said, and blinked again. “At a wedding?”

“Oh,” Bones said. “Yeah.” He blinked, too. “Maybe I got something mixed up, huh?” he said.

Carella and Meyer, on the telephone together at eight-thirty that night, agreed that somebody — either Barragan or Bones — had sure as hell got something mixed up. It was Meyer’s guess that Bones was the man with the faulty memory, and Carella agreed that perhaps the tall slinky blonde had indeed been a figment of the musician’s imagination since she seemed to have gone completely unnoticed by Vicente Manuel Barragan, who was otherwise possessed of total recall when it came to anything that had happened that night seven years ago, dredging up even snatches of dialogue such as Bones’s remark about the hotel swallowing up the whole Chadderton family. It seemed further odd to Carella that Bones’s tennis-playing lady in Pasadena appeared to be an exact replica of the blonde who’d lured Santo first onto the dance floor, where they’d danced cheek to cheek to the strains of the Harvey Cooper orchestra (amazing that Cooper was an orchestra leader in Barragan’s story but the groom in Bones’s story), and later went out into the night, where together and respectively (if not respectfully) they had proceeded to exorcise his pubescent passion and her oncoming menopause, afterward disappearing from the face of the earth forever. In Barragan’s story, the band had been playing at a fancy-dress ball, which seemed more likely than the wedding Bones remembered, especially since the blonde — if she existed at all — suddenly began wearing a mask when Bones thought about her a bit further. Barragan seemed certain that the affair had been a benefit for multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy. Was that where Bones had come up with the notion that Harvey Cooper was not only the groom but also someone who had recently been graduated from medical school? And was it the Stardust Ballroom or the Moonglow Ballroom? Or neither? Or all of the above?

“I think we’ll have to do some further work on this in the morning,” Carella said judiciously. “In the meantime, they’re waiting for me back at the table.”

“Who’s they?” Meyer asked.

“Teddy. And Bert and his wife.”

“Some people get to eat in nice restaurants,” Meyer said, “while other people eat in prisons upstate.”

“I’ll talk to you in the morning,” Carella said.

“Yeah, good night,” Meyer said.

“Good night,” Carella said.

In bed with Teddy that night, holding her close in the dark, the rain lashing the windowpanes, Carella was aware all at once that she was not asleep, and he sat up and turned on the bed lamp and looked at her, puzzled.

“Teddy?” he said.

Her back was to him, she could not see his lips. He touched her shoulder and she rolled over to face him, and he was surprised to see that there were tears in her eyes.

“Hey,” he said, “hey, honey... what...?”

She shook her head and rolled away from him again, closing herself into her pillow, closing him out — if she could not see him, she could not hear him; her eyes were her ears, her hands and her face were her voice. She lay sobbing into the pillow, and he put his hand on her shoulder again, gently, and she sniffed and turned toward him again.

“Want to talk?” he said.

She nodded.

“What’s the matter?”

She shook her head.

“Did I do something?”

She shook her head again.

“What is it?”

She sat up, took a tissue from the box on the bedside table, blew her nose, and then put the tissue under her pillow. Carella waited. At last, her hands began to speak. He watched them. He knew the language, he had learned it well over the years, he could now speak it better than hesitantly with his own hands. As she spoke to him, the tears began rolling down her face again, and her hands fluttered and then stopped completely. She sniffed again, and reached for the crumpled tissue under her pillow.

“You’re wrong,” he said.

She shook her head.

“I’m telling you you’re wrong.”

She shook her head again.

“Honey, she likes you very much.”

Her hands began again. This time they spilled out a torrent of words and phrases, speaking to him so rapidly that he had to tell her to slow down, and even then continuing at a pace almost too fast for him to comprehend. He caught both her hands in his own, and said, “Now come on, honey. If you want me to listen...” She nodded, and sniffed, and began speaking more slowly now, her fingers long and fluid, her dark eyes glistening with the tears that sat upon them as she told him again that she was certain Augusta Kling didn’t like her, Augusta had said things and done things tonight—

“What things?”

Teddy’s hands moved again. The wine, she said.

“The wine? What about the wine?”

When she toasted.

“I don’t remember any toast.”

She made a toast.

“To what?”

To you and Bert.

“To the case, you mean. To solving the case.”

No, to you and Bert.

“Honey—”

She left me out. She drank only to you and Bert.

“Now why would she do a thing like that? She’s one of the sweetest people—”

Teddy burst into tears again.

He put his arms around her and held her close. The rain beat steadily on the windowpanes. “Honey,” he said, and she looked up into his face, and studied his mouth, and watched the words as they formed on his lips. “Honey, Augusta likes you very much.” Teddy shook her head. “Honey, she said so. Do you remember when you told the story about the kids... about April falling in the lake at that PBA picnic? And Mark jumping in to rescue her when the water was only two feet deep? Do you remember telling...?”

Teddy nodded.

“And then you went to the ladies’ room, do you remember?

She nodded again.

“Well, the minute you were gone, Augusta told me how terrific you were.”

Teddy looked up at him.

“That’s just what she said. She said, ‘Jesus, Teddy’s terrific, I wish I could tell a story like her.’”

The tears were beginning to flow again.

“Honey, why on earth wouldn’t she like you?”

She looked him dead in the eye. Her hands began to move.

Because I’m a deaf mute, she said.

“You’re the most wonderful woman in the world,” he said, and kissed her, and held her close again. And then he kissed the tears from her face and from her eyes, and told her again how much he loved her, told her what he had told her that day years and years ago when he’d asked her to marry him for the twelfth time and had finally convinced her that she was so much more than any other woman when until that moment she had considered herself somehow less. He told her again now, he said, “Jesus, I love you, Teddy, I love you to death,” and then they made love as they had when they were younger, much younger.