Long Time No See

Three

“You can’t explain to anyone about seasons,” Meyer said. “You take your average man who lives in Florida or California, he doesn’t know from seasons. He thinks the weather’s supposed to be the same — day in, day out.”

He did not look much like a sidewalk philosopher, though he was indeed on the sidewalk, walking briskly beside Carella, philosophizing as they approached the Harris apartment. Instead, he looked like what he was: a working cop. Tall, burly, with china-blue eyes in a face that appeared rounder than it was, perhaps because he was totally bald and had been that way since before his thirtieth birthday.

The baldness was a result of his monumental patience. He had been born the son of a Jewish tailor in a predominantly Gentile neighborhood. Old Max Meyer had a good sense of humor. He named his son Meyer. Meyer Meyer, it came out. Very comical. “Meyer Meyer, Jew on fire,” the neighborhood kids called him. Tried to prove the chant one day by tying him to a post and setting a fire at his sneakered feet. Meyer patiently prayed for rain. Meyer patiently prayed for someone to come piss on the flames. It rained at last, but not before he’d decided irrevocably that the world was full of comedians. Eventually, he learned to live with his name and the taunts, jibes, wisecracks and tittering comments it more often than not provoked. Patience. But something had to give. His hair began falling out. By thirty his pate was as clean as a honey-dew melon. And now there were other problems. Now there was a television cop with a bald pate. If one more guy in the department called him...

Patience, he thought. Patience.

The flurries had stopped by midnight. Now, at ten on Friday morning, there was only a light dusting of snow on the pavements, and the sky overhead was clear and bright. Both men were hatless, both were wearing heavy overcoats. Their hands were in their pockets, the collars of their coats were raised. As Meyer spoke, his breath feathered from his mouth and was carried away over his right shoulder.

“Sarah and I were in Switzerland once,” he said, “this was late September a few years ago. People were getting ready for the winter. They were cutting down this tall grass, they were using scythes. And then they were spreading the grass to dry, so the cows would have what to eat in the winter. And they were stacking wood, and bringing the cows down from the mountains to put in the barns — it was a whole preparation scene going on there. They knew it would start snowing soon, they knew they had to be ready for winter. Seasons,” he said, and nodded. “Without seasons there’s a kind of sameness that’s unnatural. That’s what I think.”

“Well,” Carella said.

“What do you think, Steve?”

“I don’t know,” Carella said. He was thinking he was cold. He was thinking this was very goddamn cold for November. He was thinking back to the year before when the city became conditioned to expect only two different kinds of weather all winter long. You either woke up to a raging blizzard, or you woke up to clear skies with the temperature just above zero. That was the choice. He was not looking forward to the same choice this year. He was thinking he wouldn’t mind living in Florida or California. He was wondering if any of the cities down there in Florida could use an experienced cop. Track down a couple of redneck bank robbers, something like that. Sit in the shade of a palm tree, sip a long frosty drink. The thought made him shiver.

The Harris building seemed more welcoming in broad daylight than it had the night before. There was grime on its facade, to be sure — this wouldn’t be the city without grime — but the red brick showed through nonetheless, and the building looked somehow cozy in the bright sunlight. That was something people forgot about this city. Even Carella usually thought of it as a place tinted in various shades of black and white. Soot-covered tenements reaching into gray sky above, black asphalt streets, gray sidewalks and curbs, a monochromatic metropolis, ominous in its gloom. But the absolute opposite was true.

There was color in the buildings — red brick beside yellow, brownstone beside wood painted orange or blue, swirled marble, orange cinder block, pink stucco. There was color in the billboard posters — overlapping and blending and clashing so that a wall of them advertising attractions varying from a rock concert to a massage parlor achieved the dimension of an abstract painting. There was color in the traffic and the traffic lights — reds, yellows and greens flashing on rain-slick pavements reflecting the metallic glow of Detroit’s fancy, every color in the spectrum massed here in these crowded streets to create a moving mosaic. There was color in the debris — this city had more garbage than any other in the United States, and more often than not it went uncollected because of yet another garbage strike. It lay in plastic bags against the walls of apartment buildings, the greens, beiges and pale yellows of modern technology enclosing the waste product of a city of eight million — or tom open by rats to spill in putrefying hues upon the sidewalks. There was color, too — God help the subway rider — in the graffiti that was spray-can-painted onto the sides of the shining new mass transit cars. Latin curlicues advertising this or that macho male, redundant, but then, so was spraying your name fourteen times on as many subway cars. And lastly, there was color in the people. No simple blacks or whites here. No. There were as many different complexions as there were citizens.

Both men were silent as they climbed the steps to the entrance lobby. One of them was thinking about seasons, and the other was thinking about colors. Both were thinking about the city. They climbed the steps to the third floor and knocked on the door to apartment 3C. Carella looked at his watch, and knocked again.

“Did you tell her ten o’clock?” Meyer asked.

“Yes.” Carella knocked again. “Mrs. Harris?” he called. No answer. He knocked again, and put his ear to the door. He could hear nothing inside the apartment. He looked at Meyer.

“What do you think?” Meyer said.

“Let’s get the super,” Carella said.

They went downstairs again, found the super’s apartment where most of them were, on the ground-floor landing at the end of the stairwell hall. He was a black man named Henry Reynolds, said he’d been superintendant here for six years, knew the Harrises well. Apparently, he did not yet know that Jimmy Harris had been slain last night. He talked incessantly as they climbed the steps again to the third floor, but he did not mention what he would most certainly have considered a tragedy had he known of it, nor did he ask why the police wanted access to the apartment. Neither Meyer nor Carella considered this strange. Often, in this city, the citizens did not ask questions. They knew cops only too well, and it was usually simpler to go along and not make waves. Reynolds knocked on the door to apartment 3C, listened for a moment with his head cocked toward the door, shrugged, and then unlocked the door with a passkey.

Isabel Cartwright Harris lay on the floor near the refrigerator.

Her throat had been slit, her head was twisted at an awkward angle in a pool of her own blood. The refrigerator door was open. Crisping trays and meat trays had been pulled from it, their contents dumped onto the floor. There were open canisters and boxes strewn everywhere. Underfoot, the floor was a gummy mess of blood and flour, sugar and cornflakes, ground coffee and crumpled bisquits, lettuce leaves and broken eggs. Drawers had been overturned, forks, knives and spoons piled haphazardly in a junk-heap jumble, paper napkins, spaghetti tongs, a corkscrew, a cheese grater, place mats, candles all thrown on the floor together with the drawers that had contained them.

“Jesus,” Reynolds said.

The body was removed by twelve noon. The laboratory boys were finished with the place by two, and that was when they turned it over to Meyer and Carella. The rest of the apartment was in a state of disorder as violent as what they had found in the kitchen. Cushions had been removed from the sofa and slashed open, the stuffing pulled out and thrown onto the floor. The sofa and all the upholstered chairs in the room had been overturned, their bottoms and backs slashed open. There was only one lamp in the living room, but it was resting on its side, and the shade had been removed and thrown to another comer of the room. In the bedroom, the bed had been stripped, the mattress slashed, the stuffing pulled from it. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and overturned, slips and panties, bras and sweaters, gloves and handkerchiefs, socks and undershorts, T-shirts and dress shirts scattered all over the floor. Clothing had been pulled from hangers in the closet, hurled into the room to land on the dresser and the floor. The closet itself had been thoroughly ransacked — shoe boxes opened and searched, the inner soles of shoes slashed; the contents of a tackle box spilled onto the floor; the oilcloth covering on the closet shelf ripped free of the thumbtacks holding it down. It seemed evident, if not obvious, that someone had been looking for something. Moreover, the frenzy of the search seemed to indicate he’d been certain he would find it here.

Carella and Meyer had no such definite goal in mind, no specific thing they were looking for. They were hoping only for the faintest clue to what had happened. Two people had been brutally murdered, possibly within hours of each other. The first murder could have been chalked off as a street killing; there were plenty of those in this fair city, and street killings did not need motivation. But the second murder made everything seem suddenly methodical rather than senseless. A man and his wife killed within the same twenty-four-hour period, in the identical manner, demanded reasonable explanation. The detectives were asking why. They were looking for anything that might tell them why.

They were hampered in that both the victims were blind. They found none of the address books they might have found in the apartment of a sighted victim, no calendar jottings, no shopping lists or notes. Whatever correspondence they found had been punched out in Braille. They collected this for translation downtown, but it told them nothing immediately. There was an old standard typewriter in the apartment; it had already been dusted for prints by the lab technicians, and neither Carella nor Meyer could see what other information might be garnered from it. They found a bank passbook for the local branch of First Federal on Yates Avenue. The Harrises had two hundred and twelve dollars in their joint account. They found a photograph album covered with dust. It had obviously not been opened in years. It contained pictures of Jimmy Harris as a boy and a young man. Most of the people in the album were black. Even the pictures of Jimmy in uniform were mostly posed with black soldiers. Toward the end of the album was an eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

There were five men in the obviously posed picture. Two of them were white, three of them black. The picture had been taken in front of a tentlike structure with a wooden-frame lower half and a screened upper half. All of the men were smiling. One of them, crouching in the first row, had his hand on a crudely lettered sign. The sign read:

Among some documents scattered on the bedroom floor, they found the dog’s papers. He was a full-blooded Labrador retriever and his name was Stanley. He and his master had been trained at the Guiding Eye School on South Perry. The other documents on the floor were a marriage certificate — the two witnesses who’d signed it were named Angela Coombes and Richard Gerard — a certificate of honorable discharge from the United States Army and an insurance policy with American Heritage, Inc. The insured was James Harris. The primary beneficiary was Isabel Harris. In the event of her death, the contingent beneficiary was Mrs. Sophie Harris, mother of the insured. The face amount of the policy was twenty-five thousand dollars.

That was all they found.

The phone on Carella’s desk was ringing when he and Meyer got back to the squadroom at twenty minutes past four. He pushed through the gate in the slatted wooden railing and snatched the receiver from its cradle.

“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.

“This is Maloney, Canine Unit.”

“Yes, Maloney.”

“What are we supposed to do with this dog?”

“What dog?”

“This black Labrador somebody sent us.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, but what’s his purpose, can you tell me?”

“He belonged to a homicide victim,” Carella said.

“That’s very interesting,” Maloney said, “but what’s that got to do with Canine?”

“Nothing. We didn’t know what to do about him last night—”

“So you sent him here.”

“No, no. The desk sergeant called for a vet.”

“Yeah, our vet. So now we got ourselves a dog we don’t know what to do with.”

“Why don’t you train him?”

“You know how much it costs to train one of these dogs? Also, how do we know he has any aptitude?”

“Well,” Carella said, and sighed.

“So what do you want me to do with him?”

“I’ll get back to you on it.”

“When? He ain’t out of here by Monday morning, I’m calling the shelter.”

“What are you worried about? You haven’t got a mad dog on your hands there. He’s a seeing-eye dog, he looked perfectly healthy to me.”

“Yeah, that ain’t it, Carella. He’s got more fuckin tags and crap hanging from his collar than all the dogs in this city put together. That ain’t it. It’s what are we supposed to do with him? This ain’t a zoo here, this is an arm of the police force and we got work to do, same as you. You want this fuckin dog in your office? You want him up there fuckin up your operation?”

“No, but—”

“Well, we don’t want him here either fuckin up ours. So what I’m telling you is we don’t hear from you first thing Monday morning about what disposition is to be taken with this dog here, then he goes to the shelter and may God have mercy on his soul.”

“Got you, Maloney.”

“Yeah,” Maloney said, and hung up.

The squadroom on any given Friday looked much as it did on any other day of the week, weekends and holidays included. A bit shabby, a bit run-down at the heels, tired from overwork and over-use, but comfortable and familiar and really the only game in town when you got right down to it. To those who knew it, there were no other squadrooms anywhere else in the world. Plunk Carella down in Peoria or Perth, in Amsterdam or Amherst and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. Transfer him, in fact, to any one of the new and shining precincts in this very city, and he would have felt suddenly transported to Mars. He could not imagine being a cop anyplace else. Being a cop meant being a cop in the Eight-Seven. It was that simple. As far as Carella was concerned, this was where it was at. All other precincts and all other cops had to be measured against this precinct and these cops. Territorial imperative. Pride of place. This was it.

This was a room on the second floor of the building, separated from the corridor by a slatted wooden railing with a swinging gate. In that corridor, there were two doors with frosted glass panels, one of them marked CLERICAL, the other marked Men’s Lavatory. If a lady had to pee, she was invited downstairs to the first floor of the building, where a door on the wall opposite the muster desk was marked Women’s Lavatory. There was once a Southern cop in the station house, up there to extradite a man on an armed robbery warrant. He saw the doors marked LAVATORY and knew this was where you were supposed to wash your hands, but he wondered aloud where the commodes were. In this precinct, a toilet was a lavatory.

In all of America, a toilet was something other than what it was supposed to be. It was a bathroom or a powder room or a rest room, but it was never a toilet. Americans did not like the word toilet. It denoted waste product. Americans, the most wasteful humans on the face of the earth, did not like to discuss waste products or bodily functions. Your average polite American abroad would rather wet his pants than ask where the toilet was. In the Eight-Seven, only criminals asked where the toilet was. “Hey, where’s die terlet?” they said. Get a clutch of muggers up there, a snatch of hookers, a stealth of burglars, they all wanted to know where the toilet was. Criminals had to go to the toilet on the average of three, four times a minute. That’s because criminals had weak bladders. But they knew what to call a toilet, all right.

There were only two criminals in the squadroom at that moment, which was a bit below par for a Friday afternoon. One of those criminals was in the detention cage across the room. He was pacing the cage, but he was not muttering about his rights. This was strange. Most criminals muttered about their rights. That was a sure way of telling a criminal from your ordinary citizen accused of a crime. Your criminal always muttered about his rights. “I know my rights,” he said, and then invariably said, “Hey, where’s the terlet?” The second criminal in the squadroom was being interrogated by Detective Cotton Hawes at one of the desks just inside the row of filing cabinets on the divider side of the room. Looking at Hawes and looking at the man he was interrogating, it was difficult to tell who was the good guy and who was the bad.

Hawes was six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds. He had blue eyes and a square jaw and a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. He had a straight unbroken nose and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. He looked somehow fierce, like a prophet who’d been struck by lightning and survived. The man sitting opposite him was almost as tall as Hawes, somewhat heavier and strikingly handsome. Black hair and dark brown eyes as soulful as a poet’s. A Barrymore profile and a Valentino widow’s peak — both before our time, Gertie, but not before the gentleman’s. He was sixty-five years old if he was a day, and he had been caught burglarizing an apartment that afternoon. Caught right on the premises, burglar’s tools on the floor at his feet. Working on a wall safe when the doorman walked in with a passkey and a cop. There was nothing he could say. He listened quietly to Hawes’s questions, and answered them in a low, exhausted voice. This was his third fall. The rap was Burglary Two — he’d been caught inside a dwelling, during the day, and he’d been unarmed. But they’d throw the key away nonetheless. He was not too happy a burglar on that Friday afternoon as dusk seeped into the squadroom.

Meyer turned on the overhead lights. Hawes looked up as if a mortar had exploded over his head. His prisoner kept staring at his own hands folded in his lap. But at a desk just inside the windows facing the street, Detective Richard Genero also looked up. Genero was typing a report. He hated typing reports. That was because he did not know how to spell. He especially did not know how to spell “perpetrator,” a word essential to advancement in the Police Department. Genero invariably spelled it “perpatrator,” which was exactly how he pronounced it. He also pronounced toilet “terlet.” That was because Genero came from Calm’s Point, a part of the city that spoke American the way the people in Liverpool spoke English. Genero was a relatively new detective. He had achieved this lofty rung on the ladder of police succession by shooting himself accidentally in the foot. Or at least that had been the opening gun, so to speak, in a series of events that brought him to the attention of the departmental brass and earned for him the coveted gold shield. He was not much liked in the squadroom. He was adored, however, by his mother.

He signaled to Carella now, and Carella walked over to his desk.

“P-e-r,” Carella said.

“Yeah, I know,” Genero said, and indicated the word on his report. He had spelled it correctly. This meant that he would ask for promotion to lieutenant next week. “Steve,” he said, “there was a call for you while you were out. Captain Grossman from the lab. Something about nail scrapings.”

“Okay, I’ll get right back to him.”

Genero looked up at the wall clock. “He said if it was after five, you’d have to call him Monday.”

“Did he find anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’s that in the cage?”

“That’s my prisoner.”

“What’d he do?”

“He was fornicating in the park.”

“Is that a crime?”

“Public Lewdness,” Genero said, naming the appropriate section of the State’s Criminal Law. “PL 245, a Class B Misdemeanor. “In a public place, intentionally exposing the private or intimate parts of one’s body in a lewd manner or committing any other lewd act’ Caught him cold.”

Carella looked at the cage. “Where’s the woman?” he asked.

“She escaped,” Genero said. “I’ve got her panties, though.”

“Good,” Carella said. “Good evidence. Very good, Genero.”

“I thought so,” Genero said proudly. “He can go to jail for three months, you know.”

“That’ll teach him,” Carella said, and went back to his desk. The offender in the cage looked to be about twenty years old. He’d probably been picked up by one of the hookers cruising Grover Park, figured he’d spend a pleasant half-hour on a bright November afternoon, thinking his only risk would be frostbite, but not counting on the ever-alert protectors of the Law, as represented by Richard Genero. The offender in the cage looked as if he was more worried by what his mother would say than by the possible jail sentence he was facing. Carella sighed, opened his book of personal telephone listings, and dialed the Police Laboratory. Grossman answered the phone on the sixth ring. He sounded out of breath.

“Police Lab, Grossman,” he said.

“Sam, this is Steve.”

“I was down the hall, let me get the folder,” Grossman said. “Hold on.”

Carella waited. He visualized Grossman in the glass-walled silence of the Headquarters Building downtown. Grossman was tall and angular, a man who’d have looked more at home on a New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of the lab. He wore glasses, his eyes a guileless blue behind them. There was a gentility to his manner, a quiet warmth reminiscent of a long-lost era, even though his speech rapped out scientific facts with staccato authority. He had just been promoted to captain last month. Carella had gone all the way downtown to Police Headquarters to buy him lunch in celebration.

“Hello, Steve?”

“Yeah.”

“Here it is. James Randolph Harris, five feet ten inches tall, weight a hundred and—”

“Where’d you get this, Sam?”

“Identification sent it over. I thought you’d requested it.”

“No.”

“Maybe somebody here did.”

“Has he got a record?”

“No, no, this is Army stuff. It’s ten years old, Steve, the picture may have changed.”

“It’s changed in one respect for sure, Sam. He wasn’t blind then.”

“Do you want me to read the rest of this? I’m sure they’ll be sending a copy to you. They know it’s your case, don’t they?”

“They should know, yes. I had a man at the morgue this morning when Photo was taking prints. Wait a minute, here it is on my desk.”

“So you don’t need me to fill you in.”

“No, just tell me about the nail scrapings.”

“Your man was a gardener.”

“How come?”

“Soil under his fingernails.”

“Dirt?”

“Soil. Big difference, Steve. Dirt is what you and I have under our fingernails, right?”

“Right,” Carella said, and smiled.

“And all refined people like us,” Grossman said.

“Yes, to be sure.”

“But soil is what James Harris had under his fingernails. Combination of one-third topsoil, one-third sand and one-third humus. Good rich potting soil.”

“Where do you garden in this city?” Carella said.

“On the window sill,” Grossman said.

“Mm,” Carella said.

“Help you any?”

“I don’t know. Sam, his wife’s been killed, too, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Your boys were there this afternoon. Fd appreciate it if you got back to me with anything they found.”

“I’ll have Davies call you in the morning.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Will you be in the office?”

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be my day off,” Carella said. “Have him try me at home.”

“Okay. That it?”

“That’s it, Sam. Thank you.”

Carella hung up, started to open the manila envelope from the I.S., looked up at the clock, and instead opened his personal telephone directory again. It was now ten minutes to five, but he dialed the number anyway.

“Fort Jefferson,” a man’s voice said.

“Extension 6149, please.”

“Hold,” the man said.

Carella waited. In a moment another man’s voice came onto the line.

“C.I.D.”

“Detective Carella, 87th Precinct. I need some information, please.”

“Captain McCormick is on another line, can you wait or shall I have him call you back?”

“I’ll wait,” Carella said.

While he waited he opened the manila envelope from the I.S. It was addressed to Det Steven Carella, 87th Squad. Close, but no cigar. As Grossman had reported on the telephone, Harris did not have a criminal record; his fingerprints were on file solely because he’d once served in the United States Army. If he’d ever been fingerprinted for a civil service job, the I.S. would have come up with a similar make. The sheet told Carella very little. It gave a description of Harris, a date of birth and prints for the fingers and thumbs of both hands. He was putting the sheet back into the envelope when McCormick came onto the line.

“Captain McCormick.”

“Captain, this is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad here in Isola. I wonder if you can help me.”

“Well... McCormick said, and Carella knew he was looking at the clock.

“I realize it’s late,” he said.

“Well... McCormick said.

“But we’re investigating a pair of homicides here, and I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

“What is it you need?” McCormick asked.

“One of the victims served with the Army. I’d like his service record.”

“You’d have to put the request in writing,” McCormick said.

“This is a homicide, Captain, we like to move a little faster than—”

“Is the murder directly related to the victim’s service in the Army?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking for someplace to hang my hat.”

“Mm,” McCormick said. “In any case, we don’t have the records for anyone who isn’t currently assigned to Fort Jefferson.”

“I realize that. You’d have to call St Louis.”

“And it’ll take them anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours to make the search.”

“Would it help if I called them directly?”

“I doubt it,” McCormick said.

“Well, would you call them for me?”

“It’s almost five.”

“Not in St. Louis,” Carella said.

“Give me the man’s name.”

“James Randolph Harris.”

“When was he in the Army?”

“Ten years ago.”

“I’ll make the call. Do you want the entire Field 201-file?”

“Please. And would you tell them it’s a homicide and ask them to expedite it?”

“Yes, I’ll do that.”

“And would you ask them to send the file directly to me?”

“They’ll start quoting the Freedom of Information Act.”

“That wouldn’t be in conflict with the Act.”

“They like to go through channels. My guess is I’ll have the file on Monday, if I put enough pressure on them. My further guess is you’ll have to come all the way out to Calm’s Point to get it. Unless I can find some sergeant who’s heading into the city.”

“Please do your best.”

“I’ll try.”

“Thanks,” Carella said, and hung up.

It was a few minutes past five on the wall clock. At the other end of the room. Genero began typing again. Hawes rose abruptly from his desk, said to his prisoner, “Okay, pal, let’s go,” and led him across the squadroom to the fingerprinting table. Behind the lieutenant’s closed door, a telephone rang. It rang again, and then was silent, Carella reached into the bottom drawer of his desk where he kept the telephone directories for all five sections of the city. He opened the one for Isola, turned to the P’s, and ran his finger down the page till he came to a listing for Prestige Novelty. He dialed the number at once.

“Prestige Novelty,” a woman’s voice said.

“This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad,” he said, “I’d like to speak to the owner of the company, please.”

“I think Mr. Preston may be gone for the day,” the woman said.

“Would you check, please?”

“Yes, sir.” There was a click on the line. He waited. While he waited he speculated that half his time as a working cop was spent on the telephone; the other half was spent typing up reports in triplicate. He was thinking of taking up cigar-smoking.

“Hello?” the woman said.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry, sir, Mr. Preston has gone already.”

“Can you give me his home number, please?”

“I’m sorry, sir, we’re not permitted to give out—”

“This is a homicide investigation,” Carella said.

“Sir, I’m sorry, I still can’t take it upon myself—”

“Let me speak to whoever’s in charge there right now,” Carella said.

“Well, there’s only me and Miss Houlihan. I was just getting ready to leave, in fact, when—”

“Let me talk to Miss Houlihan,” Carella said.

“Yes, sir, but she won’t give you his number, either,” the woman said. There was another click. Carella waited. His father smoked cigars. His father had smoked cigars for as long as he could—

“Miss Houlihan,” a voice said. A nasal, no-nonsense voice. “Can I help you?”

“This is Detective Carella of the—”

“Yes, Mr. Carella. I understand you want Mr. Preston’s home number.”

“That’s right.”

“We are not permitted—”

“Miss Houlihan, what is your position with Prestige Novelty?”

“I’m the bookkeeper.”

“Miss Houlihan, we’re investigating a pair of murders here.”

“Yes, I understand. But—”

“One of the victims worked for Prestige Novelty.”

“Yes, that would be Isabel Harris.”

“That’s right.”

“We know.”

“I need Mr. Preston’s telephone number.”

“I understand that,” Miss Houlihan said. “But you see, Mr. Carella, we’re not permitted to give out the private telephone numbers of company personnel.”

“Miss Houlihan, if I have to go all the way downtown to get a warrant forcing you to divulge a telephone number—”

“We were just about to close for the weekend when you called,” Miss Houlihan said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that if you went for your warrant, there’d be no one here till Monday, anyway. And by that time you could just as easily call Mr. Preston at this number.”

“This can’t wait till Monday.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

“Miss Houlihan, are you familiar with Section 195.10 of the Penal Law?”

“No, I’m not.”

“It’s titled Refusing to Aid a Peace Officer. I’m a peace officer, Miss Houlihan, and you’re refusing to aid me.” He was telling only the partial truth. The Class-B misdemeanor was defined this way: “Upon command by a peace officer identifiable or identified to one as such, unreasonably failing or refusing to aid such peace officer in effecting an arrest or in preventing the commission by another person of any offense.”

Miss Houlihan was silent for an inordinately long time.

“Why don’t you just look it up in the phone book?” she said at last.

“Where does he live?”

“Riverhead.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Frank.”

“Thank you,” Carella said, and hung up. He pulled the Riverhead directory out of his drawer, opened it to the P’s, and ran his finger down the forty or so Prestons listed. There was a Frank Preston on South Edgeheath Road. Carella looked up at the clock and dialed the number.

The number rang five times before a woman picked it up.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Preston?”

“Who’s this, please?”

“Detective Carella of the 87th Squad.”

“Who?”

“Detective Carella of the—”

“Is this the police?”

“Yes,” Carella said.

“He’s not home yet.”

“Who am I speaking to, please?” Carella asked.

“His wife.”

“Mrs. Preston, what time do you expect him?”

“He’s usually home by six on Fridays. Is this about the blind girl?”

“Yes.”

“What a shame.”

“Yes. Mrs. Preston, would you tell your husband I’ll try to reach him again later tonight?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you,” Carella said, and put the receiver back onto the cradle.

Meyer was on the telephone at his own desk, talking to Sophie Harris, Jimmy’s mother. “We’ll be up there in about half an hour, does that sound all right?” he said, and nodded. “We’ll see you then.” He hung up, turned in the swivel chair. “You feel up to it?” he asked Carella.

“Yes, sure,” Carella said.

“She was bawling like a baby on the phone. Just got back from identifying both bodies. What’d you get from the Army?”

“Not much. I just placed a call to the man Isabel worked for, Frank Preston’s his name. I’ll try him again later, see what he can tell us. They’re both kind of blanks so far, aren’t they?”

“Jimmy and Isabel, do you mean?”

“Yeah. We don’t really know who they were, do we?”

“Not yet,” Meyer said. “Let’s go talk to Mama.”