Ghosts

5

He didn’t know quite what to do about switching back with Meyer. He had no desire to deprive him of his holiday, but at the same time he knew a door-to-door canvass of the Harborview building might prove an empty exercise tomorrow, when many of the tenants might be off sharing Christmas/Hanukkah with people elsewhere in the city. He decided to hit the building today, and the first call he made—from home—was to Meyer.

Sarah answered the telephone. She told him her husband was in the shower and asked if he could return the call when he got out. Carella said he’d be there for another hour at least. He was already wondering how he’d get to work this morning; his car was still at the curb under what looked like seven tons of snow. He hung up and called Hawes at home.

“Cotton,” he said, “I want to hit that building today.”

“Okay,” Hawes said.

“There are twelve floors, five apartments on each floor. If we split them between us, that gives each of us thirty apartments. Figure an average of fifteen minutes for each stop, we’ll be putting in an eight-hour day, more or less.”

Hawes, who was not too good at arithmetic, said, “Yeah, more or less.”

“You can go over there whenever you like,” Carella said. “I’ll be leaving here in an hour or so.”

“Okay,” Hawes said.

“You want to start at the bottom or the top?”

“My father told me to always start at the top.”

“Okay, fine, I’ll work my way up. Let’s plan on a lunch break at about one. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

“Right,” Hawes said, and hung up.

Carella was himself in the shower when he heard the phone ringing. He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, ran out into the bedroom, and caught the phone on the sixth ring. Meyer was on the other end.

“I was in the shower,” Carella told him.

“We have to stop meeting in the shower,” Meyer said. “The fellas are beginning to talk.”

“I was calling about tomorrow.”

“Yeah, what do you think?”

“I’ll have to hit that building today.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Meyer.”

“Listen, you didn’t kill those people,” Meyer said. “How do you like the snow? Is it a white enough Christmas for you? How are you getting downtown?”

“By subway, I guess.”

“Like the poor people,” Meyer said. “Listen, don’t worry about tomorrow, okay? That was our original deal anyway.”

The floor-by-floor, door-to-door canvass of 781 Jackson took Carella and Hawes a bit less time than they’d expected. Carella reached the building at a little after 10:00, a half hour after Hawes had already started on the top floor. They broke for lunch at 1:00, as they’d arranged, and were through for the day at 4:30. They stopped for coffee and crullers at a greasy spoon near the building and went over their notes together. It would later take each of them several hours to type up a collaborative report in quintuplicate from the notes they’d individually made. One copy of the report would go to Lieutenant Byrnes. Another copy would go to Captain Frick, who was in command of the entire precinct. The third copy would go to Homicide, and the remaining two copies would be filed respectively in the Craig and Esposito case folders. Normally, there would have been only four copies, but this was a case with a companion case, and vice versa.

They had, until now, thought of the Esposito murder as the true companion case, despite the cross-indexing that labeled the Craig murder a companion case as well. Now they began to look at things in a somewhat different light. They were both experienced cops, and they knew all about smoke-screen murders. One of Carella’s earliest cases—this was before Hawes had joined the squad, even before Carella and Teddy were married, in fact—had seemed to focus on a cop hater who was running around shooting policemen. But that had been only the smoke screen; the killer had really been after a specific cop and was spreading vapor to mist over the true purpose. Before Hawes’s transfer to the Eight-Seven, he’d investigated a case in which the killer had chopped off the hands of his victim and then killed two other people elsewhere in the city and chopped off their hands as well. He was after insurance money, and he’d chopped off his true quarry’s hands because he didn’t want a fingerprint identification that would have disqualified the claim. The second and third murders were smoke-screen murders, designed to lead the cops into believing they were looking for some kind of freak who went around dismembering his victims.

They would not have thought, until now, that the murder of Gregory Craig was a smoke screen for the murder of Marian Esposito. Everything seemed to indicate that the second murder was a murder of expedience—the killer fleeing from the building with a bloody knife in his hands perhaps, and being seen, and panicking at the possibility of later identification. Zzzzaaaahhhh went the knife, and zing went the strings of my heart. But now they wondered. They wondered because three separate tenants of 781 Jackson told them that Marian and Warren Esposito shared a marriage that could at best be termed rocky.

The couple who lived next door to the Espositos—in Apartment 702, one of the apartments Hawes hit—told him that on two separate occasions Marian had called the police because her husband was beating her up. On each of those occasions the responding patrolmen had settled, on the scene, what is euphemistically known to the police as “a family dispute.” But Marian walked around with a pair of black eyes for weeks after the first beating, and her nose was broken during the second beating.

The tenant in Apartment 508—who recognized Marian from the somewhat unflattering picture the Photo Unit had taken at the scene—told Carella that he’d been riding up in the elevator one time with the Espositos, and they’d started arguing about something, and Warren Esposito had grabbed his wife’s arm and twisted it violently behind her back. “Thought sure he’d break it,” the man said, and then offered Carella a glass of wine, which Carella refused. The man was waiting for his son and daughter-in-law to come visit him for the holiday. His wife had died six months ago; this was to be his first Christmas without her. He again offered Carella a glass of wine. Carella had to refuse; he was a cop on duty. But he lingered longer than the fifteen minutes he’d allotted for each apartment, sensing the old man’s loneliness and hoping to hell his son and daughter-in-law would not disappoint him.

In Apartment 601, just below the Esposito apartment, the woman tenant there told Carella that there was always a lot of yelling and thumping going on upstairs, sometimes at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. She was wrapping Christmas gifts at her kitchen table as she disclosed the information. “Sometimes,” she said, and carefully tied a bow, “if there are children living above you, there’ll be a lot of running around and noise. But the Espositos have no children. And of course, everybody in the building knows he beats her.” She picked up the scissors and gingerly snipped off the end of the ribbon.

“So it looks like we’ve got a wife beater,” Hawes said.

“Looks that way.”

“Came in yesterday wanting to know what we were doing to find his wife’s murderer,” Hawes said, and shook his head. “Had his lawyer call the lieutenant to turn on the screws. He must miss having her to bat around.”

“I want to check this with Records, see if she really did call us twice,” Carella said. “Have you got some change?”

Hawes dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of coins. Carella plucked two dimes from his palm and then went to the phone booth near the cigarette machine. At one of the other tables a blonde in her forties, wearing a sprig of holly on the collar of her coat, turned to Hawes and smiled at him. He smiled back. Carella was on the phone only long enough to get the information he needed. When he got back to the table, he said, “It checks out. First call was on August eighteenth, second one was November twelfth. I’d like to talk to Esposito right now, what do you say?”

“I’m bushed,” Hawes said. “But if he’s our man, I don’t want him spending Christmas in South America.”

They knocked on the door to the Esposito apartment at ten minutes to 5:00. Warren Esposito opened the door for them when he recognized Hawes through the peephole. He was wearing only trousers and a tank-top undershirt. He told them he was dressing to go back to the funeral parlor. He said he’d been there all afternoon and had come home to shower and change his clothes. His eyes were puffy and red; it was evident he’d been crying. Carella remembered Hillary Scott’s description of the “ghost” who’d slain Gregory Craig. Warren Esposito was perhaps thirty-four years old, with curly black hair and dark brown eyes. But how many other people were there in this city with that same combination of hair and eyes, including someone who’d announced himself as Daniel Corbett to the security guard on the day of the murders—and besides, who the hell believed in either mediums or ghosts?

Warren Esposito was no poltergeist. He was perhaps six feet two inches tall, slightly taller than Carella and just as tall as Hawes, with muscles bulging all over his chest, his biceps, and his forearms. The woman Carella had seen lying dead on the sidewalk was perhaps five feet six inches tall, and he guessed she must have weighed 115 pounds. Nice man, Mr. Muscles Esposito, Carella thought, and asked his first question.

“Mr. Esposito,” he said, “is it true that on two separate occasions your wife phoned the police for assistance in a family dispute?”

“Where’d you hear that?” Esposito said. “The people in this building ought to mind their own business. Who was it? Kruger next door?”

“The patrolmen responding to both calls made full reports,” Carella said.

“Well…there may have been one or two arguments,” Esposito said.

“And your wife called the police, right?”

“Yes, I suppose she did.”

“During one of those arguments did you blacken both her eyes?”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s in the report,” Carella said.

“We were arguing, that’s all.”

“Did you blacken her eyes?”

“I may have.”

“And on the second occasion did you break her nose?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you once twist her arm so violently that a witness thought you’d surely broken it?”

“I know who that is,” Esposito said. “That’s Di Luca down on the fifth floor, isn’t it? Boy, I wish these goddamn people would mind their own business.”

“Did you, or didn’t you?”

“I suppose so. What difference does it make? What is it you’re trying to say, Mr. Carella? Are you trying to say I killed her? Just because we argued every now and then? Don’t you argue with your wife? Are you married?”

“I’m married,” Carella said.

“So don’t you and your wife—?”

“Let’s talk about you and your wife, okay?” Carella said.

“Where were you between six and seven P.M. on Thursday night?” Hawes asked.

“Listen,” Esposito said, “if this is going to turn into a third degree here, I want to call my lawyer.”

“You don’t need a lawyer to answer a few questions,” Hawes said.

“Not unless the questions make it sound like I killed my wife.”

“Only the answers can do that.”

“I want to call my lawyer.”

“Okay, call your lawyer,” Carella said. “Tell him we’re asking you some simple questions you refuse to answer, and tell him we may have to get those answers before a grand jury. Go ahead, call him.”

“A grand jury? What the hell…?”

“A grand jury, yes. Call your lawyer.”

“I will.”

“I wish you would. We’re wasting time here.”

Esposito went to the phone and dialed a number. He listened as the phone rang and then said, “Joyce, this is Warren Esposito. Is Jerry there? Thank you.” He waited again, and then said into the phone, “Jerry, I’ve got two detectives here, and they’re asking questions about where I was Thursday, and threatening me with a grand jury…Sure, just a second.” He held out the phone to Carella. “He wants to talk to one of you.”

Carella took the phone. “Hello?” he said.

“Who’s this?” the voice on the other end said.

“Detective Carella, 87th Squad. Who’s this?”

“Jerome Lieberman, Mr. Esposito’s attorney. I understand you’ve been threatening my client with a grand jury if he—”

“No one’s been threatening anybody, Mr. Lieberman. We wanted to ask some questions, and he wanted to call his lawyer. So he called you, and here you are.”

“What’s all this about a grand jury?”

“We want to know where he was when his wife was murdered. Your client has a history of wife abuse…”

“I’d be careful what I say, Mr. Carella…”

“Yes, sir, I am being careful. The police were called to this apartment on two separate occasions, I’ve already verified that. On the first occasion Mrs. Esposito’s eyes were bruised and discolored—that was on August eighteenth, Mr. Lieberman—and on the second occasion she was bleeding from the nose, and the patrolman making the report stated that the nose was broken. That was on November twelfth, last month. With such a record, I feel it’s reasonable for us to want to know where your client was at the time of the murder. If he refuses to answer our questions…”

“Have you advised him of his rights, Mr. Carella?”

“We’re not obliged to. This is still a field investigation; your client’s not in custody.”

“Do you plan to take him in custody?”

“On what grounds, counselor?”

“You tell me. You’re the one with all the answers.”

“Counselor, let’s quit playing games, okay? If your client had nothing to do with his wife’s murder, he’s got nothing to worry about. But if he refuses to answer our questions, we’ll subpoena him to appear before a grand jury, and maybe he’ll agree to tell them where he was at the time of the murder. Because if he refuses to tell them, as I’m sure you know, he’ll be held in contempt. Now we can do whatever you say, Mr. Lieberman. This is Christmas Eve, and you know as well as I that we won’t be able to get any grand jury action until the twenty-sixth, but if that’s what you want us to do, just say so. If you’d like my advice—”

“Oh, are you an attorney, Mr. Carella?”

“No, Mr. Lieberman, are you? We want some answers from your client, that’s all. My advice is for you to advise him to cooperate. That’s my advice. Free of charge.”

“And worth every penny you’re charging,” Lieberman said. “Put him back on.”

Carella handed the phone to Esposito. “Yeah,” he said, and listened. “Uh-huh…Are you sure it’s okay?…. All right, I’m sorry to bother you this way, Jerry. Thank you. And Merry Christmas,” he said, and hung up. “What are your questions?” he asked Carella.

“Where were you Thursday night between six and seven P.M.?”

“Coming home from work.”

“Where’s that?” Hawes asked.

“Techno-Systems, Inc., on Rigby and Franchise.”

“What do you do there?” Carella asked.

“I’m a computer programmer.”

“What time did you leave the office on Thursday?”

“Five-thirty.”

“How do you normally get home?”

“By subway.”

“It shouldn’t have taken you more than a half hour from Rigby and Franchise. If you left the office at five-thirty…”

“I stopped for a drink.”

“Where?”

“A place called Elmer’s, around the corner from the office.”

“How long were you there?”

“About an hour.”

“Then, actually, you didn’t start home till about six-thirty, is that it?”

“Six-thirty, a quarter to seven.”

“Who were you drinking with, Mr. Esposito?”

“I was alone.”

“Are you a regular at Elmer’s?”

“I stop in there every now and then.”

“Where’d you drink? At a table or at the bar?”

“The bar.”

“Does the bartender know you?”

“Not by name.”

“Anybody there know you by name?”

“One of the waitresses does. But she wasn’t working on Thursday.”

“What time did you get back here to Harborview?”

“Seven-thirty or thereabouts. The trains were running slow.”

“What’d you do when you got here?”

“There were policemen all over the place. I asked Jimmy what was going on and…that was when he told me my wife had been killed.”

“By Jimmy, do you mean…?”

“Jimmy Karlson, the security guard.”

“What’d you do then?”

“I tried to find out where they’d taken her. They’d moved her body by then. I tried to find out where she was. Nobody seemed to know. I came upstairs and called the police. I had to make six calls before anyone gave me any information.”

“Did you know there’d been another murder in the building?”

“Yes, Jimmy told me.”

“Told you it was Gregory Craig on the third floor?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know Mr. Craig?”

“No.”

“Never ran across him in the elevator or anything?”

“I wouldn’t have known him if I’d seen him.”

“What’d you do when you found out where they’d taken your wife?”

“I went to the morgue and made a positive identification.”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know who it was. One of the medical examiners, I guess.”

“What time was that?”

“Around nine o’clock. They said I…I could have the body at noon Friday. So I came back here and called the funeral parlor and made arrangements to…to have her picked up.”

“Mr. Esposito,” Carella said, “we’ll have to check with Elmer’s to make sure you were there. It would help us if we had a photograph we could show the bartender. Would you happen to have a recent picture?”

“My attorney didn’t say I could give you a picture.”

“Call him again if you like,” Carella said. “That’s the only thing we’ll use it for, to show at Elmer’s for identification.”

“I guess that’s okay,” Esposito said. He started out of the room, turned, and said, “I didn’t kill her. We had our troubles, but I didn’t kill her.”

They did not get to Elmer’s till almost 7:00 P.M.

The bar on Christmas Eve was packed with men and women who had no place else to go, no cozy hearths, no glowing Christmas trees, only the dubious comfort of each other’s company. They lined the bar and sat at the tables, and raised their glasses in yuletide toasts, and watched the television set, on which a movie about a family holiday reunion was showing. There were two bartenders behind the bar. Neither of them had been working on Thursday night, when Esposito claimed to have been drinking here alone for an hour or more. They recognized his picture, but they couldn’t say he’d been here since they themselves hadn’t been here. The bartender who’d been working on Thursday—they explained that only one man worked the bar during the week and two on weekends—was a man named Terry Brogan, who was a moonlighting city fireman. They gave the detectives Brogan’s home number and also the number at Engine Company Number Six, uptown in one of the city’s highest fire-rate districts. From the phone booth in the bar they called Brogan at home and got no answer. They called the firehouse and spoke to a captain named Ronnie Grange who said Brogan had taken his wife and kids to Virginia for the Christmas holidays; his sister lived in Virginia.

When they left the bar, Carella said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Cotton.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t ever get murdered just before Christmas.”

They shook hands on the sidewalk, wished each other a Merry Christmas, and then walked off in opposite directions toward the two different subway lines that would take them home.

It was beginning to snow again.

Carella did not get home that night till almost 8:30. The snow was raising hell with the subway system on its aboveground tracks, and the trains were infrequent and plodding. Outside the Riverhead house he struggled his way through snowdrifts to the front door. There was a kid up the street who was supposed to shovel the walks every time it snowed. They paid him $3 an hour for the job, but it was obvious he hadn’t been here since yesterday’s storm. The new snow had tapered off a bit; the air was bristling with the tiniest of crystals. He stamped his feet on the front porch. The wreath on the door was hanging a bit askew; he straightened it and then opened the door and went inside.

The house had never looked more welcoming. A roaring blaze was going in the fireplace, and the tree in the corner of the room was aglow with reds, yellows, blues, greens, and whites that reflected in the hanging ornaments. Teddy was wearing a long red robe, her black hair pulled to the back of her head in a ponytail. She came to him at once and hugged him before he had taken off his coat. He remembered again the afternoon before; he would have to tell her that Hillary Scott had tried to amputate his lower lip with her teeth.

He had mixed himself a martini and was sitting in the chair near the fire when the twins came into the living room. Both were in pajamas and robes. April climbed into his lap; Mark sat at his feet.

“So,” Carella said, “you finally got to see Santa.”

“Uh-huh,” April said.

“Did you tell him all the things you want?”

“Uh-huh,” April said.

“Dad…” Mark said.

“We missed you a lot,” April said quickly.

“Well, I missed you, too, darling.”

“Dad…”

“Don’t tell him,” April said.

“He’s got to know sooner or later,” Mark said.

“No, he don’t.”

“Doesn’t.”

“I said doesn’t.”

“You said don’t.”

“Anyway, don’t tell him.”

“Don’t tell me what?” Carella asked.

“Dad,” Mark said, avoiding his father’s eyes, “there is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

“You told him,” April said, and glared at her brother.

“No such thing, huh?” Carella said.

“No such thing,” Mark repeated, and returned April’s glare.

“How do you know?”

“’Cause there’s hundreds of them all over the street,” Mark said, “and nobody can move that fast.”

“They’re his helpers,” April said. “Isn’t that right, Dad? They’re all his helpers.”

“No, they’re just these guys,” Mark said.

“How long have you known this?” Carella asked.

“Well…” April said, and cuddled closer to him.

“How long?”

“Since last year,” she said in a tiny voice.

“But if you knew there wasn’t any Santa, why’d you agree to go see him?”

“We didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” April said, and again glared at her brother. “Now you hurt his feelings,” she said.

“No, no,” Carella said. “No, I’m glad you told me.”

“It’s you and Mommy who’s Santa,” April said, and hugged him tight.

“In which case, you’d better go to bed so we can feed the reindeer.”

“What reindeer?” she asked, her eyes opening wide.

“The whole crowd,” Carella said. “Donder and Blitzen and Dopey and Doc…”

“That’s Snow White!” April said, and giggled.

“Is it?” he said, grinning. “Come on, bedtime. Busy day tomorrow.”

He took them to their separate rooms, and tucked them in, and kissed them good-night. As he was leaving Mark’s room, Mark said, “Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“Did I hurt your feelings?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Cause…you know…I thought it would be better than lying.”

“It always is,” Carella said, and touched his son’s hair, and oddly felt like weeping. “Merry Christmas, son,” he said quickly, and turned from the bed, and snapped out the light.

Teddy came out of the kitchen with a tray of hot cheese puffs and then went to say her own good-nights to the children. When she came back into the living room, Carella was mixing himself a second martini. She cautioned him to go easy.

“Long hard day, honey,” he said. “Do you want one of these?”

A scotch, please, she said. Very light.

“Where’s Fanny?” he asked.

In her room, wrapping gifts.

They sat before the fire, sipping their drinks, nibbling at the cheese puffs. She told him dinner would be ready in a half hour or so, she hadn’t been sure what time he’d be getting home, it was heating in the oven now. He apologized for not having called, but he and Hawes had been on the go since early this morning, and he simply hadn’t found a spare moment. She asked him how the case was going, and he told her all about Hillary Scott and her twin sister, Denise, told her how Hillary had known not only Teddy’s first name but her maiden name as well, told her she’d somehow divined April’s name, told her she’d known that April resembled her mother.

Then he told her about the kiss.

Teddy listened.

He told her how he’d tried to pull away from Hillary, told her she’d fastened to his mouth like an embalmer’s trocar trying to drain his fluids, told her all about the trance that had followed, Hillary shaking and swaying and talking in a spooky voice about drowning and somebody hearing something, somebody stealing something. Teddy listened and said nothing. She remained uncommunicative all through dinner, her hands busy with her utensils, her eyes avoiding his. After dinner they carried the wrapped presents up from where they’d hidden them in the basement and arranged them under the tree. He told her he’d better shovel the walks before the snow froze solid, and she remembered then to tell him that the boy up the street had phoned Fanny earlier to say he wouldn’t be able to get to the house over the weekend because he had to go to his grandmother’s.

Outside, shoveling snow, Carella wondered if he should have told Teddy about the kiss after all. He had not mentioned that Hillary Scott looked like a younger version of her, and he was glad now that he hadn’t. The air had turned very cold. When he came back into the house, he stood before the dwindling fire for several moments, warming himself, and then went into the bedroom. The light was out. Teddy was in bed. He undressed silently and got into bed with her. She lay stiffly beside him; her breathing told him she was still awake. He snapped on the light.

“Honey, what is it?” he said.

You kissed another woman, she said.

“No, she kissed me.”

That’s the same thing.

“And besides, it wasn’t a kiss. It was…I don’t know what the hell it was.”

It was a kiss, that’s what the hell it was, Teddy said.

“Honey,” he said, “believe me, I…”

She shook her head.

“Honey, I love you. I wouldn’t kiss Jane Fonda if I found her wrapped under the Christmas tree tomorrow morning.” He smiled and then said, “And you know how I feel about Jane Fonda.”

Oh? Teddy said. And how do you feel about Jane Fonda?

“I think she’s…well, she’s a very attractive woman,” Carella said, and had the feeling he was plowing himself deeper than any of the snowdrifts outside. “The point I’m trying to make—”

I once dreamed Robert Redford was making love to me, Teddy said.

“How was it?” Carella asked.

Pretty good, as a matter of fact.

“Honey?” he said.

She watched his lips.

“I love you to death,” he said.

Then no more kisses, she said, and nodded. Or I’ll break your goddamn head.