Calypso

8

Monday morning, September 18, while Meyer was on the phone checking with both the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in an attempt to determine whether either or both had sponsored a benefit ball early in September seven years ago, Carella took a call from a man named Henry Gombes at Ballistics.

“On these spent bullets found at the scene,” he said.

“This the Chadderton case?” Carella asked.

“Chadderton, Chadderton,” Gombes said, obviously consulting a sheet of paper in front of him, “yes, Chadderton, Culver and South Eleventh, September fifteenth, that’s right.”

“That’s right,” Carella said.

“I’ll send the report on later,” Gombes said, “but meanwhile, do you want to take some of this stuff down?”

“Shoot,” Carella said.

“No ejected cartridge casings found at the scene, which indicates the weapon wasn’t an automatic pistol. Five bullets were recovered, though, three of them badly deformed—”

“Those would’ve been the three that hit the victims,” Carella said.

“Two victims, were there?”

“Yes.”

“One still alive from what I understand.”

“That’s right.”

“Did he say how many shots he’d heard?”

“He couldn’t remember.”

“The reason I ask... the fact that only five bullets were found at the scene doesn’t necessarily indicate the revolver had only a five-shot capacity.”

“It was empty when the killer tried to finish him off,” Carella said.

“Is that right? Mmm. Well, in any case, the recovered bullets all measured .3585 inches in diameter, which tells us we’re dealing with a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson cartridge. Your twist in inches was 183/4 to the right, and your groove diameter was .357, which would be the markings a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver would leave on a bullet, and which — when combined with the six lands we found — would seem to point pretty conclusively toward a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver firing .38-caliber Smith & Wesson cartridges. You’ve got your Regulation Police Model 33 taking Smith and Wesson .38s, and you’ve got your Terrier Model 32, which also takes the Smith & Wesson .38s, and both guns have a five-shot capacity. Now your Chiefs Special and your Bodyguard Model and also your Centennial take .38 S & W Specials, which have the same twist and groove as your regular .38, but your .38 Special has a different diameter than your .38, and the reading we got — as I told you — was .3585, which is the diameter of a .38 bullet and not a .38 Special bullet. Our micrometers here are calibrated to one one-thousandth of an inch, so I don’t think we’ve made any mistake about the caliber of this gun, it’s a .38, all right, and given all the other factors, I’d say a Smith & Wesson .38, either the Regulation Police or the Terrier, both of which have five-shot capacities. Your Regulation Police — what do you carry, Carella?”

“The Special.”

“Mm, well, your Regulation comes only with a four-inch barrel. Your Terrier comes with a two-inch barrel, and it’s a lighter gun, seventeen ounces as opposed to eighteen for the Regulation. Are we dealing with a man or a woman here?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Not that the ounce makes any difference, but the shorter barrel might. Easier to get in a handbag, do you see?”

“Yes,” Carella said.

“So that’s it,” Gombes said. “A .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, either the Regulation Police Model 33 or the Terrier Model 32. Hope I was able to help you,” he said, and hung up.

Meyer was still on the phone. Carella went down the hall to the Clerical Office and asked Miscolo to contact Communications and ask them to send out an interdepartmental flyer to all precincts asking for any information bearing on a suspect .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, Regulation Police Model 33 or Terrier Model 32, used in a fatal shooting on the night of September 15. Miscolo said he would call Communications as soon as his coffee perked. Carella went back up the hall to the squadroom, where Meyer was just putting up the phone.

“Any luck?” he asked.

“It wasn’t muscular dystrophy, and it wasn’t multiple sclerosis,” Meyer said. “Maybe it was a wedding, after all. Maybe the groom was a Dr. Harvey Cooper and maybe—”

“Let’s try the A.F. of M.,” Carella said. “Find out if they’ve got a member named Harvey Cooper. If they do—”

“Yeah, but will their job records go back seven years?”

“It’s worth a try. If you get anything, move on it. I want to start visiting some of these people who were in Chadderton’s appointment calendar.”

“How many names you got there?”

“Ten or so. Let me see,” Carella said, and began counting the names he’d listed in his notebook. “Eight that Chloe Chadderton could identify, two she didn’t know, and two sets of initials — C.J. and C.C.”

“Have you called any of them yet?”

“I was about to do that now.”

“Want to split the list with me?”

“First see what you get at the A.F. of M.”

Cynthia Rogers Hargrove was wearing a quilted dressing gown over what appeared to be a granny nightgown with a lace Peter Pan collar. A pearl choker was around her neck. Mrs. Hargrove was seventy-six years old if she was a day. She sat opposite Meyer Meyer at a damask-covered table in the dining alcove of her Hall Avenue apartment, the pouring rain streaking eastern windows that might otherwise have been streaming sunshine. Mrs. Hargrove spoke with the sort of voice Meyer associated with only the very wealthy — it was not only in Britain that a person’s vocal inflections gave away his class. Mrs. Hargrove was Vassar out of Rosemary Hall out of private elementary school someplace in the city. Mrs. Hargrove was sleek-lined sloops racing off Newport. Mrs. Hargrove was afternoon tea in Palm Beach. Mrs. Hargrove was breakfast at ten o’clock on a Monday morning when almost everyone else in the city had been up since seven and had consumed his first meal of the day before eight. In this land of the free and home of the brave, in this nation where all men were created equal, Mrs. Hargrove was nonetheless living testament to the wag’s adage that some men were created more equal than others. Meyer felt somewhat intimidated in her presence. Perhaps because he’d never eaten a toasted English muffin with genuine Scottish gooseberry jam on it. As he bit into it, he was certain the crunch could be heard clear uptown and crosstown in the very muster room of the Eight-Seven. Hastily, he sipped at his coffee, hoping to muffle the sounds of mastication.

“The Blondie Ball, we called it,” Mrs. Hargrove said.

Meyer blinked at her, and then said, “The Blondie Ball?”

“Yes. Do you know the comic-strip characters? Blondie and Dagwood? Are they familiar to you?”

“Yes, certainly,” Meyer said.

“That was our theme. The comic strip. More coffee?” she asked, and reached for the silver coffeepot just to the right of her plate. “How did you happen to get to me?” she asked, pouring.

“I called the A.F. of M.,” Meyer said, “and they—”

“A.F. of M.?”

“American Federation of Musicians.”

“Yes, surely,” Mrs. Hargrove said.

“Yes,” Meyer said, “and asked them if they could check their records... I discovered the leader has to file contracts with them, the band leader...”

“Oh, yes, I would imagine,” Mrs. Hargrove said.

“Yes,” Meyer said, “and I asked them to check on a musician named Harvey Cooper...”

“Oh, yes.”

“The name means something to you?”

“Yes, he’s the man I hired for the job.”

“Yes,” Meyer said, “this was seven years ago, September the eleventh, to be exact, this is all information the union gave me. And they also supplied me with your name and address, which was on the contract you signed.”

“Yes, how simple really.”

“It took us a little while to get there,” Meyer said. “Earlier, we were looking for something sponsored by either the Muscular Dystrophy Association or the National Multiple Sclerosis—”

“Oh no, nothing quite that grand,” Mrs. Hargrove said. “Do have another muffin, Mr. Meyer. They will go to waste otherwise.”

“But it was a charity ball, isn’t that so?”

“Yes. But what one might call a private charity, rather than one of the national organizations, do you understand?”

“What was the charity?”

“We were trying to establish a scholarship fund for the local high school. So that deserving youngsters might go on to college. Most of the local residents, as you can appreciate, send their children to preparatory schools when they’re of age. But the neighborhood high school is really quite good, and we felt the youngsters there should be given the same opportunities the more privileged youngsters enjoy.”

“I see,” Meyer said. “So the purpose of the ball was to raise money for this scholarship fund?”

“Yes.”

“How much did you hope to raise?”

“The estimated four-year tuition and living expenses for a student at a quality institution of higher learning was approximately twenty thousand dollars. We hoped to raise enough to send three students to college for the full four-year terms.”

“Then you hoped to raise sixty thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“And how much did you actually raise?”

“Twenty thousand more than that. The ball was quite successful. I imagine the Blondie theme had a lot to do with it.”

“What does that mean actually,” Meyer asked, “the Blondie theme?”

“Well, it was a fancy-dress ball, you understand. The women all had to come as Blondie and the men had to come as Dagwood. Some of them brought along their dogs, of course, posing as Daisy, the dog in the comic strip. I tried to discourage that, I made it clear in the preball announcements that animals were not encouraged, hoping of course they would understand we didn’t want a plethora of Daisys. But some people missed the point, however bluntly I’d worded it. We had three hundred and twenty Blondies, an equal number of Dagwoods, and at least a dozen Daisys.”

“Dogs running around, do you mean?”

“Yes. Well, not precisely running around. We were prepared for such an occasion, you see. We had contacted an organization that supplies dog-walkers—”

“Dog-walkers?”

“Yes. College students, usually, who will take dogs for their ritual walks during the day, for example, in a situation where both people in a marriage are working people, or at night, should anyone simply not desire the responsibility of walking an animal — a position I find quite understandable, by the way. I loathe dogs, don’t you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say I—”

“Positively loathsome,” Mrs. Hargrove said. “Then again, all animals are. Why people would want to keep pets is beyond my imagination. Filthy little things, all of them. In any event, we had this cadre of trained dog-walkers on hand to redeliver, so to speak, any wayward pup whence it had come. Only two of the patrons objected. One of them had a dachshund that was supposed to represent Daisy, can you visualize that, and the other had a Pekingese. We put them in separate cloakrooms — the dogs, not the patrons — and solved the problem that way. But really, can you imagine what bedlam we would have had if everyone were allowed to bring a dog? Some people have no sense at all when it comes to animals. None whatsoever. Loathsome beasts, all of them.”

“When you say you had three hundred and twenty Blondies...”

“Yes, we sold that many admission tickets. Two hundred and fifty dollars a couple. Three hundred and twenty women masquerading as Blondie and three hundred and twenty men with their hair sticking up in front, the way Dagwood’s sticks up — the poor man has a cowlick at the front of his head — and wearing bow ties. Blondie and Dagwood.”

“What was the purpose of that, Mrs. Hargrove?”

“The purpose? Oh, it was just a gimmick, Mr. Meyer. But it earned us eighty thousand dollars in admissions, which wasn’t bad. And the Cadillac we gave as first prize for the best impersonation was donated by a local dealer.”

“Was there a contest or something for the best costume?”

“Well, not merely the costume. Dagwood and Blondie, after all, are not that distinctively dressed in the comic strip. In fact, I think it was the very simplicity of the theme that accounted for its success, don’t you see? The women, after all, could wear whatever they chose, so long as they were blond in the bargain. And the man needed only a bow tie and a little hair pomade. But it was for the overall impression that the prize was awarded. The way a couple walked and moved, the representation, the impersonation of Blondie and Dagwood. They were all masked, you understand...”

“Masked, yes.”

“Yes. So there was absolutely no question of favoritism on the part of the judges. They could judge only by... oh, intangibles. Whether a couple actually created the image of the comic-strip characters come to life.”

“I see. If I understand this correctly then, all of the women were wearing blond wigs.”

“Well, not all of them.”

“You said...”

“Yes, but some of them were natural blondes.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“Or if not natural blondes, at least accepting a little assistance from a beautician. Those women, of course, did not need wigs.”

“Of course not.”

“But you are correct in assuming that the overall impression was of a ballroom full of three hundred and twenty blondes, yes.”

“Yes,” Meyer said.

“Yes.”

“All of them masked,” Meyer said.

“Yes. Which is where I think the fun came in, don’t you? Can you picture a room full of masked blond women? Doesn’t it sound a great deal of fun?”

“Yes,” Meyer said, “it does. Mrs. Hargrove, the musicians union told me the affair was held at the Hotel Palomar...”

“Yes, downtown, directly opposite the Palomar Theater.”

“Which ballroom, ma’am, can you remember?”

“Yes, the Stardust Ballroom.”

“Is that a large ballroom?”

“Not so large as their Grand Ballroom, but we didn’t want a room so enormous that the people would rattle around in it. We rather cherished the notion, you see, of all those masked blondes and masked men in polka-dot ties dancing cheek to cheek and buttock to buttock in a more intimate ballroom. That’s why we chose the Stardust Ballroom. That was the fun of it, you see, that was the point.”

“Did you have any opportunity to talk with any of the musicians that night, Mrs. Hargrove?”

“Only Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper handled all the arrangements for me, my contract was with Mr. Cooper, he supplied both bands. They were quite good actually. The other band played Latin-type music, do you know?” she said, and lifted both hands and snapped her fingers.

“But aside from Mr. Cooper, you didn’t talk to any of the musicians in either band?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Then the name George Chadderton would mean nothing to you?”

“Nothing whatsoever.”

“Or Santo Chadderton?”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Hargrove said.

All the way uptown, Meyer kept thinking of an expression Mrs. Hargrove had used: “a plethora of Daisys.” Take the last word out of the proper-name category and basket it, so to speak, as a common noun in the plural, and you ended up with “A Plethora of Daisies,” which — it seemed to Meyer — was an uncommonly good title for a novel. He had begun noticing of late how many lousy novels had very good titles, and was beginning to suspect that a good title was enough to sell even the most meretricious book. He could see the title A Plethora of Daisies adorning the jacket of a hardcover novel. He could see it in perhaps less refined type on the cover of a paperback book: A Plethora of Daisies. He could see it in lights on a movie marquee: A PLETHORA OF DAISIES. He really liked that damn title.

When he got back to the squadroom, he told Carella all about his meeting with Mrs. Hargrove, and Carella told him all about his visits with two of the people on his list of names — Buster Greerson and Lester Hanley — both of whom had shared strictly business, and somewhat casual, relationships with Chadderton. One of them expressed surprise that he was dead; the other had read about it in the papers. Carella and Meyer both agreed it was a damn shame there’d been so many blondes in attendance — natural, bleached, or bewigged — that night seven years ago, since all they knew about the woman who’d spent a goodly amount of time with Santo was that she was a tall, willowy California-type blonde. This was the first time the word “willowy” had put in an appearance; it was Meyer who used the adjective, perhaps because he’d been thinking novelistically ever since leaving Mrs. Hargrove.

“I got a list of all the guests from her,” he said, “and I—”

“The Blondie Ball,” Carella said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, the Blondie Ball. Not the ones who bought tickets at the door, but everybody else. I thought I might check the Palomar, just to see if anybody on the guest list also happened to take a room there that night.”

“You can check it,” Carella said, “but I think it’ll be a waste of time. We’ve got ourselves a plenitude of blondes—”

“Not to mention a plethora of daisies,” Meyer said.

“And we don’t even know which of them were real blondes. So even if one of the guests did check into a room with Santo, how’s the hotel register going to indicate that fact? All we’ll know is that somebody who was at the ball happened to stay at the hotel that night. What we won’t know—”

That was when the telephone rang.

It was a Detective Alex Leopold of Midtown South calling to say he’d caught their flier on the suspect .38, and thought there might be a connection between their case and the one he was handling — a hooker shot to death on the sidewalk late Friday night, with a weapon Ballistics said had been a .38 Smith & Wesson.

Alex Leopold was a dyspeptic little man (little for a police detective; actually, he was five feet ten inches tall) who immediately told Carella and Meyer that he wished he was still back at the 11th Precinct in Calm’s Point. In the 11th, you didn’t get hookers killed on a Saturday night. In the 11th, which was the precinct enclosing exclusive Calm’s Point Heights (“Cee Pee Aitch,” as it was known affectionately to any foot patrolman lucky enough to claim the area as his beat), the most vigorous crime reported in a month of Sundays would have been the burglarizing of a famous novelist’s apartment, or the kidnapping of a prize pooch from the town house of a suburban artist who used the Cee Pee Aitch address as a pied-à-terre in the city. Cee Pee Aitch still had gaslit lampposts in its quaint old cobblestoned streets. Cee Pee Aitch did not have hookers in its quaint old cobblestoned streets; in the 11th, Alex Leopold would have been surprised indeed to have found a dead one on his doorstep.

The hooker found dead this past Friday night (well, really 4:12 A.M. on Saturday morning, but dark in the streets, and night in the streets, and whereas the D.D. report was dated 9/16, Leopold thought of it as 9/15 in his mind) hadn’t exactly been found on his doorstep, but too close for comfort nonetheless, the Midtown South station house being on Jefferson and Purdy, three blocks from where Clara Jean Hawkins was left bleeding on the sidewalk with a fatal bullet-hole tunnel drilled through her chest and her heart, another hole in her larynx, and yet another in her face, just to the right of her nose. Leopold had taken the squeal at 4:15 A.M., three minutes after a citizen called on the 911 emergency number to report somebody bleeding on the sidewalk. By the time he got to the scene, Forbes and Phelps from Homicide were already standing there in the rain, bitching. In all the years Leopold had worked out of the 11th, he had never handled a homicide. He had worked there for twenty-two years. He made the mistake of mentioning this to either Phelps or Forbes, he couldn’t tell them apart and didn’t care to, and they immediately categorized him as a sissy cop from a silk-stocking precinct, which wasn’t far from the truth, but which irked the shit out of him at 4:15 A.M. on a rainy Friday night/Saturday morning with a black girl full of holes lying dead on the sidewalk.

The only identification in her handbag was a Social Security card with her name on it: Clara Jean Hawkins. No driver’s license, no credit cards, no electric or telephone company bills, just the Social Security card. At the scene, Forbes or Phelps, or perhaps both, suggested that maybe the girl was a hooker — what with it being four o’clock in the morning and all — but Leopold put this notion aside, accustomed as he was to the exalted crimes in the 11th. He routinely did what had to be done, and then went back to the office to consult the city’s telephone directories. There were seventy-eight listings for Hawkins in the Isola directory alone. Determined to call each and every one of them — it was by then ten past five in the morning, when most decent citizens were asleep — he began dialing and struck pay dirt at 5:27 A.M. when a sleepy-voiced woman named Dorothy Hawkins said yes, she knew Clara Jean Hawkins, Clara Jean was her daughter.

Now, at a quarter past noon, some fifty-five hours after Leopold had located the girl’s mother, he gave his report to Carella and Meyer. “Turned out she hasn’t been living at home for the past few months now,” he said. “Her mother says she was a hooker, lived in a pad run by a pimp named Joey Peace. I never heard of him, I’m from the 11th.”

“I never heard of him, either,” Meyer said.

“Just goes to show,” Leopold said, and wagged his head philosophically.

“Did you try to get a line on him from the I.S.?” Carella asked.

“No record. Not under the Peace alias, anyway. That’s got to be an alias, don’t you think? Joey Peace? That can’t be the man’s kosher handle.”

“Did you try the phone book?” Carella asked.

“Yeah, no Peace. The dead girl’s mother doesn’t know who he is, she only heard her daughter mention the name. Doesn’t know who any of the other girls are, either, the three others who are supposed to be living in the apartment with her daughter and this Peace character. So where do I go from here? I’ve got a positive make on the girl, and I know what she did for a living — according to her mother, anyway. But that’s all I know so far, and all I’m likely to know unless your case can throw some light on mine.”

“Few possibilities we ought to check out first,” Carella said.

“Like what?” Leopold asked.

“Well,” Carella said, “I think we ought to drop in on the various hot-bed hotels in the Midtown South area, find out if anyone recognizes the girl’s name or her picture, see if we can’t get a line on her pimp that way. Under ordinary circumstances, we wouldn’t get any cooperation. But this is a homicide, they may be willing to tell us what they know. Next, I think we ought to check out the massage parlors. Same questions — Do you know anybody named Clara Jean Hawkins? Do you know anybody named Joey Peace? — tell them right out the girl is dead and we’re trying to find her killer, hint it might be some psycho sex-fiend customer, scare them a little. Next, it wouldn’t hurt to chat up some of the active pimps in Midtown South, I’m sure there’s a file on them in your office — I’m surprised, in fact, that you haven’t got at least a card on this Joey Peace. Anyway, let’s find out who’s working the precinct, and chat them up, no threats of arrest, nothing like that, just a nice curbside heart-to-heart, all we want to know is who’s Clara Jean Hawkins, and who’s this guy Joey Peace. We might hit pay dirt, who knows? So okay? First the hotels and massage parlors, and then the pimps themselves. Meanwhile, we’ll put out a flier on Joey Peace, just an info request to all precincts. One of them might have something on him in their Lousy File. I’m really glad you called, Leopold. We’d about come to a dead end.”

“Yeah,” Leopold said. There was a dazed expression on his face. He wasn’t quite sure he was so glad he’d called.