Ghosts

1

They might have been ghosts themselves, the detectives who stood in the falling snow around the body of the woman on the sidewalk. Shrouded by the swirling flakes, standing in snow three inches deep underfoot, they huddled like uncertain specters against the gray facade of the apartment building behind the slain woman. The two Homicide men who stood on the pavement with Detective Cotton Hawes were wearing black overcoats and gray fedoras. Hawes was hatless. His red hair shrieked into the monochromatic hush, echoing the blood that stained the woman’s clothing. There was a streak of white just above Hawes’s left temple, the memento of a scuffle while investigating a burglary; it seemed almost a wider patch of the snow crystals that glistened in his hair.

The Homicide detectives stood with their hands in the pockets of their overcoats. This was four days before Christmas, and the time was 7:00 P.M. Monoghan had not yet bought a present for his wife; neither had Monroe. The stores would be open till 9:00 tonight, and they had planned to go shopping the moment they were relieved at a quarter to 8:00. Instead, they’d taken the call from the Eight-Seven, and Christ alone knew how long they’d be here on the sidewalk with Hawes and his partner Carella, who was standing at the curb talking to the patrolman who’d been first at the scene.

“Musta been coming home with her groceries,” Monoghan said.

“Yeah, look at that stuff all over the sidewalk,” Monroe said.

“Wheaties,” Monoghan said.

“She eats the breakfast of champions,” Monroe said.

“Used to eat,” Monoghan corrected.

“Knocked her ass over teacups,” Monroe said.

“She’s got good legs,” Monoghan said.

The woman on the sidewalk seemed to be in her early thirties. She was a white woman, and she was wearing a plain cloth coat open over a white blouse, black skirt, and black boots. The front of the blouse, just under her left breast, had been slashed when the knife entered her chest. The entire left side of the blouse was drenched with blood. The skirt had pulled back over her thighs when she fell to the sidewalk. She lay on her back, arms and legs akimbo, one fist clenched, the brown shopping bags scattered around her, one of them torn, their contents strewn. The strap of a black shoulder bag had fallen loose to her elbow.

“Did you check her handbag yet?” Monoghan asked.

“I’m waiting for the techs to get here,” Hawes said.

“Guy who did it could be in Outer Mongolia, time the techs get here.”

“They’re on the way,” Hawes said.

“Did you call the ME?”

“I’m not new on the job,” Hawes said.

“Oh, he’s not new on the job,” Monoghan said to his partner.

“He’s old on the job,” Monroe said, and took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He was coming down with a cold, and he didn’t need to be standing here in the snow with a smartass dick from the 87th. But in the city for which these men worked, the appearance of Homicide detectives at the scene of a murder was mandatory; the detectives who’d answered the squeal at the precinct would be handling the case and were required to file regular reports with Homicide.

Detective Steve Carella turned from the radio motor patrol car. He was a tall, slender white man with the casual stride of an athlete, and he came walking over slowly, seemingly lost in thought, his head bent. His eyes—squinted now against the falling snow—were somewhat slanted, giving his face a faintly Oriental look that intensified the semblance of deep, inscrutable meditation. Like Hawes, he was hatless. Like Hawes, he was wearing a plaid mackinaw over a woolen shirt and corduroy trousers; they had just returned from a fruitless warehouse stakeout when the call came in.

“Beat officer recognizes the woman,” he said. “She lives in the building right here, he doesn’t know her name.”

“I told your partner here to go through her bag,” Monoghan said.

“New regs call for the techs to do that,” Carella said.

“Fuck the new regs,” Monoghan said. “We’re standin’ here freezin’ our asses off, and you’re worried about the new regs.”

“You want to authorize it?” Carella said.

“I ain’t authorized to authorize it,” Monoghan said.

“Okay then, we wait for the techs. Meanwhile, I’d like to talk to the security guard. You want to listen in?”

“Better than standing out here in the snow,” Monoghan said.

“I’ll start the sketch, Steve,” Hawes said.

“Better get them crime scene signs up,” Monroe advised over his shoulder, and followed Carella and Monoghan into the building. The apartment complex was part of a citywide project to reclaim deteriorating slums. It rose in concrete and glass splendor on the outer fringes of the 87th, replacing half a dozen tenements that had previously squatted here. The security guard was a white man in his early sixties, Carella guessed, wearing a gray uniform with a yellow and blue Security Patrol patch on the left arm. He looked apprehensive and wary, as if the cops were about to blame him for something.

“I’m Detective Carella, 87th Squad,” Carella said. “These men are from Homicide.”

The security guard nodded and then wet his lips.

“What’s your name?” Carella asked.

“Jimmy Karlson.”

“Are you the regular security guard here, Mr. Karlson?”

“Yes, sir. Well, there are four of us—five, actually, if you count the one after midnight.”

“What are your shifts?”

“Six A.M. to twelve noon, noon to six P.M., six to midnight, and midnight to six. Four shifts. On the midnight to six, we’ve got an extra man patrolling the grounds with a dog.”

“What time did you come on tonight, Mr. Karlson?”

“Six. Well, actually a little after. I don’t have snow tires on the car, and I got held up by the storm.”

“Do you know we’ve got a dead lady outside?” Monoghan asked.

“Yes, sir, I do. The man who found her came in here to make the call, in fact.”

“Who was that?” Carella asked.

“I don’t know. He said there was somebody hurt on the sidewalk and asked if he could use the phone. Soon as he made the call, he walked off. I guess he didn’t want to get involved.”

“And what did you do?” Monroe asked.

“I went outside to see what it was.”

“Did you recognize the woman?”

“Yes, she lives here in the building. Esposito, Apartment 701.”

“What’s her first name?” Monoghan asked.

“I don’t know.”

“She married, single?” Monroe said.

“Married. Her husband should be home any minute, in fact.”

“Did you see anything that happened out there?” Carella asked.

“No, sir, I did not. The security desk is sort of off to the right here. I couldn’t have seen anything happening out there on the sidewalk.”

“Did you see Mrs. Esposito when she left the building?”

“No, sir, I did not. That would have been this morning sometime. She goes to work, you see, and she usually gets home just after I’ve come on—maybe ten after, a quarter after six.”

“Stopped to pick up some groceries, just like I told you,” Monoghan said to Monroe.

The patrolman Carella had been talking to just a few minutes earlier came walking over from the RMP car. He looked troubled. He hesitated before opening the glass door to the lobby, and then stamped snow from his shoes, and again hesitated before he said what he had to say, like a king’s messenger fearful of losing his head for bringing bad news.

“We got another one,” he said. “Upstairs in Apartment 304.”

The second call had come into Communications Division at exactly ten minutes past 7:00. The dispatcher had put the information into his computer, and the two-hour sector scan of previously reported incidents had confused him at first. Car Adam Eleven had been dispatched to the same scene a half hour earlier: a cutting on Jackson and Eighth. But the first victim had been reported as a white female bleeding on the sidewalk outside 781 Jackson, and this new call was from a hysterical woman in Apartment 304, and she was telling the police there was a man stabbed on the bedroom floor up there, and could they please send somebody right away? The dispatcher had radioed Adam Eleven again and told him to check upstairs, and the patrolman who took the call in the RMP car said, “You got to be kidding,” and then walked over to where the detectives were talking with the security guard.

The woman who’d called the police was waiting in the third-floor corridor for them. She was a white woman in her early twenties, Carella guessed, with brown eyes and black hair, and she so closely resembled his wife that he hesitated mid-stride as he came out of the elevator and then did a double take and realized this could not be Teddy; Teddy was home in Riverhead with Fanny and the kids. The resemblance was not lost on Hawes. He glanced swiftly to Carella and then looked down the corridor again to where the woman stood just outside the open door to Apartment 304. She was wearing her overcoat, the shoulders still damp with melted snow. There was a look of utter panic on her face and in her eyes. The cops came down the corridor in a flying wedge, Carella and Hawes in the forefront, Monoghan and Monroe behind them. Monroe was thinking this was just what they needed, another stiff.

“Where is he?” Carella asked.

“Inside,” the woman answered. “In the…the bedroom.”

The front door opened into a foyer with a mirror and mail table facing the entrance. The apartment branched off on both sides of the hall. On the right, Carella could see through an open door into the kitchen. On the left was the living room. They came through quickly, no signs of disorder, the room decorated neatly and expensively in clean modern, several paintings on the walls, a bar unit with a whiskey decanter and two glasses on it, both of them sparkling, everything neat and clean and orderly. The bedroom was quite another matter. From the moment they walked through the door, they knew this was going to be a bad one.

The room was in complete disarray. The drawers of the white Formica dresser had been pulled out, the clothing thrown all over the floor. Men’s clothes and women’s clothes, undershorts and brassieres, lingerie and pajamas, dress shirts and silk blouses, baby-doll nightgowns and socks, crewneck sweaters and bikini panties lay strewn in androgynous confusion on the thick pile rug. The doors on both closets were open, and the clothes had been pulled from their hangers and scattered over the floor, the bed, and the chairs. Men’s sports jackets and suits, women’s gowns and skirts, high-heeled pumps, walking shoes, loafers, topcoats, trench coats, overcoats—all twisted a tortuous trail across the rug to where the dead man lay on the side of the bed farthest from the door.

He was a white man—in his early fifties, Carella guessed—wearing blue slacks, a lime green T-shirt, and a dark blue cardigan sweater. No shoes. His hands were bound behind his back with a twisted wire hanger. The T-shirt had been slashed to ribbons. There were stab wounds on his chest and his throat and his hands and his arms. One ear dangled loose from the right side of his head, where it had been partially severed. Carella looked down at the dead man and felt again a familiar mixture of horror and sadness—the same each and every time—a revulsion for the violence that had reduced a human being to a fleshy pile of bloody rubble, a grief for the utter wastefulness of it. He turned to Hawes and said, “If the ME’s downstairs, we’d better get him up here.”

“Better get another team of techs, too,” Monoghan said. “Otherwise, we’ll be here all night.”

On one wall of the room, facing the windows that overlooked the River Harb, there was a long white Formica desk with a typewriter on it. A ream of yellow paper rested on the desktop, just beside an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. A sheet of paper was in the typewriter. Without touching either the paper or the machine, Carella leaned over the desk and read the typewritten words:

There was, from the beginning, a palpable sense of something alien in the house. I had been called here to investigate the claim that poltergeists had invaded the premises, and there was no question now, before I had taken three steps into the entrance hall, that the claim was valid. The air virtually hummed with unseen specters. When there are ghosts in a place

“Suicide note?” Monroe asked behind him.

“Sure,” Carella said. “The guy’s laying on the floor with his hands tied behind him and thirty-six knife wounds in his chest…”

“How do you know there’s thirty-six?” Monoghan said.

“Make it forty,” Carella said. “It’s obviously a suicide.”

“He’s pulling our leg,” Monroe said.

“He’s joshing us.”

“He’s a very humorous cop.”

“All the cops at the Eight-Seven are very humorous.”

“You want to know something, Carella?”

“Go fuck yourself, Carella.”

The woman who looked like Carella’s wife was waiting in the living room outside. She had not yet taken off her coat. She sat in one of the stark white easy chairs, her hands clasped over the bag in her lap. As they talked, Hawes came back with the Medical Examiner and led him silently into the bedroom. The second team of lab technicians arrived, and they went about their task like a hush of pallbearers.

“When did you find him?” Carella asked.

“Just before I called the police.”

“Where’d you make the call?”

“Here. Right here.” She indicated the white telephone resting on the bar unit alongside the decanter and the two clean glasses.

“Touch anything else in the apartment?”

“No.”

“Just the phone.”

“Yes. Well, the doorknob, when I came in. I unlocked the door, and then I called to Greg, and when I got no answer, I went straight to…to the bedroom and…and…that was when I saw him.”

“And then you called the police.”

“Yes. And…and I went outside to…to wait for you. I didn’t want to wait in here. Not with…not with…”

Carella took out his notebook and busied himself with finding a clean page. He suspected she was about to cry, and he never knew what to do when they began crying.

“Can you tell me his name, please?” he asked gently.

“Gregory Craig,” she said, and paused, and looked into Carella’s eyes, and he felt she expected some sort of response she wasn’t getting. Puzzled, he waited for her to say something more. “Gregory Craig,” she repeated.

“Would you spell that for me, please?”

“G-R-E-G-O-R-Y.”

“And the last name?” “C-R-A-I-G.”

“And your name?”

“Hillary Scott.” She paused. “We weren’t married.”

“Where were you coming from, Miss Scott?”

“Work.”

“Do you usually get home at about this time?”

“I was a little late tonight. We were waiting for a call from the Coast.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

“I work for the Parapsychological Society.” She paused and then said, “I’m a medium.”

“A medium?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, what…?”

“I’m gifted with psychic powers,” she said.

Carella looked at her. She seemed sane enough, sitting there in her wet overcoat, her hands clenched on her pocketbook, her eyes beginning to mist with tears. In his notebook, he wrote the word “Medium” and then put a question mark after it. When he looked up again, she was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief she’d taken from her bag.

“Where did Mr. Craig work?” he asked.

“Here,” she said.

“Here?”

“He’s a writer,” she said, and paused. “Gregory Craig, the writer.”

The name meant nothing to Carella. In his notebook, under the word “Medium,” he wrote “Victim writer,” and then realized she had said, “Gregory Craig, the writer,” and further realized she’d been expecting recognition of the name all along. Cautiously he asked, “What sort of writing did he do?”

“He wrote Deadly Shades,” she said, and again looked directly into his eyes, and he was certain this time that he was supposed to recognize the title of the book Craig had written—if it was a book. He did not ask what it was.

“And he worked here in the apartment, is that it?” he said.

“Yes, in the bedroom. There’s a desk in the bedroom. That’s where he worked.”

“All day long?”

“He usually began about noon and quit about six.”

“And wrote, uh, books or—what is it he wrote, actually, Miss Scott?”

“You haven’t read Deadly Shades?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“It’s already sold three million copies in paperback. The movie is being shot right this minute.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with it.”

She said nothing. She simply looked at him. He cleared his throat, glanced at his notebook again, looked up, and said, “Any idea who might have done this?”

“No.”

“Did Mr. Craig have any enemies that you might know of?”

“None.”

“Had he received any threatening telephone calls or letters in the past—”

“No.”

“—several weeks? Anything like that?”

“No, nothing.”

“Did he owe anybody money?”

“No.”

“How long have you been living in this building, Miss Scott?”

“Six months.”

“Any trouble with the neighbors?”

“None.”

“When you got home tonight, was the door locked?”

“Yes. I told you I opened it with my key.”

“You’re sure it was locked?”

“Yes.”

“You heard the tumblers falling when you turned your key?”

“Yes, I know it was locked.”

“Did anyone beside you and Mr. Craig have a key to this apartment?”

“No,” she said. “Just the two of us.”

“Thank you, Miss Scott,” he said, and closed the notebook. He tried a smile and then said, “I’ll have to look for Deadly Shades. What’s it about?”

“Ghosts,” she said.

The head security officer was waiting downstairs with Karlson when Carella got back to the lobby. His name was Randy Judd, and he was a big, beefy Irishman in his sixties. He told Carella at once that he used to be a patrolman working out of the Three-Two. He also mentioned there’d never been any trouble here at Harborview since the complex was built a year ago. Not even a burglary. Nothing.

“The security is very tight at Harborview,” he said.

“Very tight,” Karlson said. He still looked apprehensive, as if more than ever certain the cops would somehow blame him for this.

“Mr. Karlson,” Carella said, “you told me a little while ago that you came to work at six tonight…”

“A little after.”

“A little after six, right. Did you announce anyone to Mr. Craig between the time you came on and…”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Is that usual procedure? Announcing visitors?”

“Standard practice,” Judd said.

“All visitors,” Karlson said. “Even delivery boys.”

“Then what happens?”

“When we get clearance from the tenant, the visitor can go up.”

“On the elevators there?”

“Unless it’s a delivery. The service elevator is around to the back.”

“And no one came here asking for Mr. Craig?”

“No one.”

“Who had the shift before you? The noon to six?”

“Jerry Mandel.”

“Have you got his home phone number?” Carella asked.

“Yes, but it won’t do you any good,” Judd said.

“Why not?”

“He was going skiing this weekend,” Karlson said. “Had his skis on top of the car, in fact, was driving upstate the minute I relieved him.”

“When will he be back?”

“Day after Christmas,” Judd said. “He had vacation time coming. I gave him the okay. He’s a big skier.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Someplace upstate,” Karlson said.

“Did he mention the name of the hotel or the lodge?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Can I have that phone number anyway?” Carella said.

“Sure,” Judd said. “It’s right in the office here.”

From the office phone Carella dialed Mandel’s home number. He let the phone ring twelve times and then hung up.

“No luck, huh?” Judd said.

“No,” Carella said, and shook his head.

“I told you,” Karlson said. “He was leaving straight from here.”

“Any way of getting in this building except through the front entrance?” Carella asked.

“The garbage is collected out back,” Judd said. “There’s a big door there, we unlock it when the garbage truck gets here.”

“What kind of lock on it?”

“Schlage deadbolt.”

“Who has the key?”

“Building superintendent.”

“Is he here now?”

“Sure. You want to talk to him?”

The building superintendent was a black man named Charles Whittier. He was eating his dinner when Judd introduced him to Carella. A television set was going in the other room, and Carella could see through the open door to where a black woman in a robe and slippers was sitting watching the screen, a dinner plate on her lap. She got up the moment she realized visitors were in the apartment and closed the door. Behind the closed door the television voices droned. A cop show. Carella hated cop shows.

“Mr. Whittier,” Carella said, “a murder was committed upstairs in Apartment 304, we clocked the call in at seven-ten. Was the door back here open at any time today?”

“Yes, sir, it was,” Whittier said.

“Who opened it?”

“I did.”

“When?”

“Twelve noon, when the garbage truck come.”

“Did you let anyone inside the building?”

“Just the garbage men. We keeps the garbage cans inside here ’cause we don’t want rats to get at them. There’s rats in this neighborhood, you know.”

“Every neighborhood,” Judd said, defending his turf.

“So the garbage men come inside here to pick up the cans, is that it?”

“They’re not obliged to,” Judd said, “but we give them a few bucks each year around this time.”

“How many garbage men?” Carella asked.

“Two,” Whittier said.

“Were you here while they were in the building?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Either of them remain inside the building?”

“No, sir. They picked up the garbage, and I locked the door after them.”

“Did you open that door again at any time after that?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“When?”

“When it started snowing bad. I wanted to get out and do a little shoveling before it got too heavy to move.”

“What’d you shovel?”

“The ramp back there. So’s the garbage truck can get in tomorrow.”

“Did you lock the door while you were outside?”

“No, sir, I did not. But I could see it all the time I was shoveling.”

“See anybody come in here?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you watching the door every minute?”

“No, sir, not every minute. But I had my eye on it.”

“What time was this?”

“When I started shovelin’? Musta been about five-thirty thereabouts.”

“And you didn’t see anyone going into the building?”

“No, sir. I’da called Security right off had I seen anybody.”

“Okay, thanks, Mr. Whittier,” Carella said. “Sorry to have interrupted your meal.”

On the way upstairs, Judd said, “Security’s very tight here at Harborview, like I told you.”

Carella was thinking it hadn’t been tight enough to prevent a murder on the third floor or one outside on the sidewalk.