Long Time No See

Four

The tempo of the city was changing.

From the dreary four/four of the workaday week, it was moving into a swifter beat, a quarter note played with the speed of an eighth, a sixteenth flashing by like a thirty-second — this was Friday night and the weekend was ahead. On the island of Isola, uptown and down, the citizens poured out of subway kiosks, heading for hot baths and fresh threads. In Riverhead, Calm’s Point and Majesta, the public transportation system was mostly aboveground, the elevated structures winding above the city streets with all the grace of poor planning, steel supporting-pillars embedded in concrete that was wedded to cobblestones that went back to the turn of the century. The elevated tracks and elevated platforms created a landscape of eternal shade below. The graffiti-sprayed subway cars came up out of their underground tunnels and clattered along the tracks toward distant destinations; to someone who lived at the other end of Riverhead, the farthest station stop in Calm’s Point was a two-hour-and-ten-minute ride away. You could get to Paris on the Concorde in just a little while longer. Here in Diamondback, the tracks were underground, and the only ugliness to be seen was in the tenements that lined the avenues and streets.

Diamondback was black, and black is beautiful — but Diamondback wasn’t. The blacks coming up out of those subway kiosks worked in a variety of jobs during the day, most of them menial. Many of the women cleaned house for other women, soaping fine china and polishing heavy sterling, dusting furniture bought abroad in French and English antique shops, hanging custom-designed dresses in closets where sables and minks nuzzled side by side, rinsing out crystal champagne glasses, and putting into the garbage outside the kitchen door empty magnum bottles with labels they could not pronounce. Some of the men worked in the kitchens of restaurants, washing dishes or sweeping floors, fetching or carrying while in the dining rooms out front the patrons ordered pâté de fois gras or filet mignon à la Béarnaise. Some of the men were responsible for keeping the garment industry going, pushing racks of clothes from dress house to dress house in the teeming area below Kerry Cross, weaving in and out of traffic with the skill of toreadors dodging bulls. The cabs they avoided and eluded as they pushed their wheeled wardrobes were largely driven by black men like themselves, who carried wealthy passengers to luxurious apartment buildings on terraces overlooking the River Dix, where black women worked washing fine china and polishing heavy sterling, the cycle repeating itself ad infinitum.

The building in which Sophie Harris lived was a far cry from the river-view apartments on the city’s south side, an even farther cry from the cloistered private homes in Smoke Rise, hugging the city’s other shore. There was no doorman here; there was not even a door. Someone had removed it from its hinges, leaving only the gaping jamb, beyond which was an entrance alcove. The alcove was a five-by-eight cubicle with a row of mailboxes on its left. They found a nameplate for Sophie Harris, pressed the bell under her name, and went to the inner-lobby door, which was still there though badly scarred with names in hearts. They did not expect an answering buzz, and got none. In Diamondback, the locks on most lobby doors had been broken when there were still Indians running in the forests, and the landlords hadn’t bothered to replace them. Instead, the tenants fortified their own apartment doors with enough locks to keep out an army of thieves. A man who got to be forty and still wasn’t his own best doctor was a man who needed a doctor. And a man who lived in Diamondback for more than forty minutes without becoming an expert locksmith was a man who needed his apartment burglarized.

The stink of piss hit them the moment they opened the inner-lobby door. Carella backed away from it as if struck in the face with a slops bucket. Meyer said, “Phhhh,” and hurried toward the stairs. A radio blared from behind a door on the first-floor landing, the disc jockey’s rapid-fire shpiel riding in over the rock-and-roll beat as he extolled the merits of a skin cream. On the second floor a scrawny calico cat was sitting in the hallway. She looked at the detectives warily, as though she were a burglary suspect. There were cooking smells and all the smells of living in the building, combining to render the nostrils numb. They knocked on the door to Sophie Harris’ apartment.

A woman said, “Who is it?”

“Detective Meyer,” Meyer said. “We spoke on the phone just a little while ago.”

They heard the locks being undone. First the deadbolt, then the Fox lock, its heavy buttress bar thudding to the floor as she lowered it. The door opened.

“Come in,” she said.

As they stepped into the apartment, Carella wondered what the majority of black people in the United States of America felt when they were watching black people portrayed on television. Did they think Golly, that’s me? If they lived in a Diamondback apartment — where the first thing you saw upon entering was the exposed and rat-gnawed electrical wiring over the sink — did they think what they saw on television was an accurate portrayal of their own human condition? Or did those blacks cavorting on the small screen symbolize for them the hope of America? Could their own problems be one day reduced to the mindless sitcom chatter that flowed into their own living rooms, where overhead leaking pipes bloated the ceiling and would continue to do so till the plaster caved in, despite repeated phone calls to the landlord (who was white) and to the Department of Health (which didn’t give a damn)?

Sophie Harris was a woman in her late forties. She might have been a beauty when she was younger — her complexion was a warm chocolate brown, her eyes an amber the color of a cat’s, she was still slender and tall — but the burden of living in the non-television black world had stooped her shoulders and grayed her hair, lined her face and reduced the timbre of her voice to a hoarse whisper further weighted by the tragedy of the recent murders. She apologized at once for the appearance of the apartment — it seemed spotlessly clean to both Carella and Meyer — and then offered the detectives something to drink. Whiskey? Tea? There might be a little wine in the refrigerator — anything? The detectives declined. Outside the living-room window, where they sat beneath the bloated and threatening ceiling, the neon sign of the bar across the street flickered against the curtainless night. There was the sound of an ambulance siren someplace — in this city, there was always the sound of sirens.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “there are some questions we’d like to ask about your son and daughter-in—”

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I’ll try to assist you as best I can.”

She was adopting the kind of formal speech many blacks used with whites, especially when the whites were in a position of authority. It was phony and fake, it denied the ethnicity that the phony and fake television sitcom shows simulated so well. To television-watchers, the sitcom shows were real. Never mind this shitty apartment in Diamondback. Whatever they saw on the tube was the reality. The real Depression family was the one on television, forget your own father who struggled along on five bucks a week in 1932. The television doctors were real, the television cops were real, everything on television was real except science fiction, and even that was more real than the moon shots.

So here they sat. Two real cops and a real black woman. One of the cops was Italian, but he didn’t wear a dirty raincoat, and he didn’t fumble for words and he didn’t pretend he was dumb. The other cop was bald, but he didn’t suck lollipops and he didn’t shave his pate clean and he didn’t dress like the mayor. The black woman wasn’t married to a man who owned a string of drycleaning stores, and she wasn’t dressed as if she were going to Bingo. She was embarrassed by the presence of the two men because they were white — even though her own daughter-in-law had been white. And she was intimidated by them because they were cops. All three sat there in real and uncomfortable proximity because someone real had murdered two other people. Otherwise, they might never have met each other in their entire lives. That was something television missed — the purely accidental nature of life itself. In televisionland, everything had a reason, everyone had a motive. Only cops knew that even Sherlock Holmes was total bullshit, and that all too often a knife in the back was put there senselessly. They were here to learn whether there’d indeed been a motive; they would not have been surprised to learn there hadn’t been the shred of one.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “did your son and daughter-in-law have many friends?”

“Some, I believe.” Still the phony speech. Carella guessed she would use the word “quite” within the next several sentences. “Quite” was a sure indication that someone was using language he or she did not ordinarily use.

“Would you know their names?”

“I did not know any of their friends personally.”

“Did they ever talk bitterly about any of them?”

“No, I never heard them say anything nasty about anyone.”

“Would you know if they’d argued recently with—”

“I believe they got along quite well with everyone.”

“What we’re trying to find out is whether anyone—”

“Yes, I know. But you see... they were blind.”

Again the blindness. Again the blindness as a reason for denying the fact that they’d both been murdered. They were blind, therefore they could not have been brutally slain. But they had been.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “please try to think beyond their blindness. I know it’s difficult to believe anyone would harm two helpless—”

“But someone did,” Mrs. Harris said.

“Yes. That’s exactly my—”

“Yes,” she said.

“Who, Mrs. Harris? Can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted to harm them?”

“No one.”

“Were there any problems either of them were having? Did Jimmy or your daughter-in-law ever come to you for advice of a personal nature?”

“No, never.”

“Were they happy together, would you say?”

“They seemed very happy.”

“Did Jimmy have another woman?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I would have heard about it.”

“How about Isabel?”

“She was devoted to him.”

“Did they visit you often?”

“They came at least once a month. And on holidays, Christmas Thanksgiving — they were supposed to come here next week. I already ordered the turkey,” she said. “Ten pounds. There was going to be six of us — Jimmy and his wife, my daughter Chrissie and her boyfriend, and a man’s been coming around to see me.” Her speech had suddenly changed. Talk of the Thanksgiving holiday next week, of the homely preparations for it, had jerked her back into her own familiar speech pattern. These two white detectives might not be able to understand or to share her blackness, but at least they understood Thanksgiving. White or black, in America everyone understood turkey drumsticks and pumpkin pie, sweet potatoes and a word of grace.

“When they came to visit—”

“Yes,” she said, and nodded. She was thinking they would not come to visit ever again. The knowledge was plain on her face; it turned her amber eyes to ashes.

“Did anyone in the neighborhood comment about the nature of their marriage?”

“What do you mean?”

“That she was white.”

“No. Not to me, anyway. I guess there were some figured Jimmy had no cause marryin a white girl. But they wouldn’t dare say nothing to me about it.”

“How did you feel about it, Mrs. Harris?”

“I loved that girl with all my heart.”

“Did you know you’re the contingent beneficiary of your son’s insurance policy?”

“After Isabel, yes,” she said. “The second beneficiary.” She shook her head. “Bless their hearts,” she said.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Carella said, and watched her.

“Bless their hearts,” she said again.

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “this man you say you’ve been seeing... may I ask you his name?”

“Charles Clarke.”

“How long have you known him?”

“About six months.”

“How serious is your relationship?”

“Well... he’s asked me to marry him.”

“Have you accepted?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Do you think you might marry him?”

“I might.”

“Have you told him this?”

“I told him maybe after Chrissie was out of the house. She’s about to get married herself next year, the weddin’s set for June, that’s when her boyfriend’ll be graduating high school.”

“How old is she?” Carella asked.

“Chrissie’s seventeen.”

“And you told Mr. Clarke you might marry him in June?”

“After Chrissie’s out of the house, yes.”

“What’d he think about that?”

“Well, he’s in a hurry, same as any man.”

“What sort of work does he do?”

“He’s a fight manager.”

“Who does he manage?”

“Fighter named Black Jackson. You ever hear of him?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“He fights at St. Joe’s all the time. St. Joseph’s Arena.”

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “I hope this won’t offend you.” He hesitated. “Did you and Mr. Clarke ever discuss money?”

“Sometimes.”

“Did he know that you were the contingent beneficiary of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar insurance policy?”

“Yes.”

“You told him?”

“Jimmy did. He was talking about if anything should happen to him and Isabel, I’d be well taken care of. He had all to do to take care of hisself, but he was always worryin about me.” She looked directly into Carella’s eyes. “If you’re thinkin Charlie had anything to do with killing my boy and his wife, you’re dreaming, mister.”

“We’d like to talk to him, anyway,” Carella said.

“You can talk to him if you like, he lives right around the comer on Holman, 623 Holman. But it wasn’t Charlie who killed them. You ask me...”

“Yes, Mrs. Harris?”

“It must’ve been somebody crazy,” she said. “It had to be somebody crazy.”

Well, maybe it had been somebody crazy.

The city was full of bedbugs, true enough, and whereas they usually surfaced during the hot summer months, there was no law that said a lunatic couldn’t come out of the woodwork in the middle of November and kill two helpless blind people. The trouble with the crazies of the world, however, was exactly that: they were crazy. And with crazy people, you couldn’t go looking for reasons, you couldn’t start thinking about motives. With crazies, you just went along on the theory that maybe you’d stumble over a solution somehow, maybe the guy would go berserk in a crowded restaurant and you’d arrest him and he’d confess to having killed sixty-four blind people in the past month, all in different cities. One of them in London. There were a lot of crazies on television cop shows, the network reasoning being that the home viewer felt more content watching a show where a nut was doing all the killing, instead of a nice sane person with a motive, just like you or me. Crazies made very soothing killers. They were not much fun to track down, however, since there was no place to start and no place to go. All you could do was hope, and hope is the thing with feathers.

So they went to see Charlie Clarke, who at least had a possible reason for wanting Jimmy and Isabel Harris out of the way. In the land of the blind, and so on. And in the absence of any solid suspects, you grabbed for the nearest floating straw, hoping it would take on the dimensions of a lifeboat or a log.

The building on Holman was similar to the one in which Sophie lived. Lettered in white paint on successive risers of the front stoop were the warnings No Loitering and No Stoop Ball. They went into the outer lobby, where a row of broken mailboxes was on the walk to their left. There was a nameplate for Charles C. Clarke in the box for apartment 22. The upper half of the inner-lobby door was a piece of frosted glass that had a crack running diagonally across it from the lower left-hand comer to the upper right. The door was unlocked. The ground-floor landing stank of piss and wine. There were no lights. Carella turned on his flash, and together they climbed the steps.

“What do you suppose the C is for?” Meyer asked.

“What C?”

“Charles C. Clark,” Meyer said.

“Oh. Clarence?”

“My guess is Cyril.”

“No, either Clarence or Clyde.”

“Cyril,” Meyer said.

The light bulb on the second-floor landing had not been smashed or pilfered. Carella snapped out his flash. The metal numerals on Clarke’s door were painted the same brown color as the door itself. There were three visible keyways on the door; Charlie Clarke was no fool. There was also a metal bell twist just below the numbers. Carella took it between his thumb and forefinger, and gave it a twirl. The sound from within the apartment was sharp and jangling. He tried it again. He looked at Meyer, and was about to try it another time when a door at the end of the hall opened. A small boy looked out into the hallway. He was perhaps eight years old. He had brown skin and brown eyes, and he was letting his hair grow into an Afro. He was wearing bedroom slippers and a plaid bathrobe belted at the waist.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Carella said.

“You looking for Mr. Clarke?”

“Yes,” Carella said. “Do you know where he is?”

“At the gym. He’s got a price fighter, did you know that?”

“Name of Black Jackson,” Carella said.

“You did know, huh?”

“Yep.”

“What’s his middle name?” Meyer asked.

“Black Jackson’s? He ain’t got no middle name,” the boy said. “Black Jackson, that’s his name,” he said, and raised his fists in a boxer’s classic pose. “I got the flu,” he said. “I’m s’posed to be in bed.”

“You better get back there, then,” Meyer said. “Where’s the gym?”

“Up on Holman.”

“What’s Mr. Clarke’s middle name?”

“Don’t know,” the boy said, and grinned and closed the door.

They started down the steps again. On the first-floor landing, Carella turned on his flashlight again. A huge black woman wearing a green cardigan sweater over a flowered housedress was standing at the foot of the steps as they came down to the ground floor. Her hands were on her hips.

“What’s the heat, Officers?” she asked. They had not identified themselves, but she knew fuzz when she saw it.

“No heat,” Carella said.

“Who you lookin for, then?”

“None of your business, lady,” Meyer said. “Go back in your apartment, okay?”

“I’m the super in this building, I want to know what you two men are doing here.”

“We’re from Housing and Development,” Meyer said, “checking on whether they’re light bulbs on every landing. Go put in some light bulbs or we’ll be back with a warrant.”

“You ain’t from no Housing and Development,” the woman said. Meyer and Carella were already in the outer lobby. They did not know whether or not Charlie Clarke had done anything, but they did not want a telephone call warning him that the police were on the way. Behind them, they heard the super saying, “Housing and Development, sheeeee-it.”

Charlie Clarke was a dapper little man wearing a yellow turtleneck shirt and a tan cardigan sweater over it. Dark brown trousers. Brown patent-leather shoes. Cigar holder clamped in one corner of his mouth, dead cigar in it. They found him on the second floor of the gym on Holman and 78th, elbows on the ring-can-vas, watching a pair of black fighters sparring. One of the fighters was huge and flatfooted. The other was smaller but more agile. He kept dancing around the bigger fighter, hitting him with right jabs. All around the gym other fighters were skipping rope and pounding the big bags. In one comer a small pale man who looked like a welterweight kept a punching bag going with monotonously precise rhythm. Carella and Meyer walked over to the ring. Clarke had been described to them downstairs. The description proved to be entirely accurate, right down to the dead cigar in his mouth.

“Mr. Clarke?” Carella asked.

“Yeah, shh,” he said. "What the fuck you waitin on, man?” he shouted to the rink. The smaller, more agile fighter stopped dancing around the larger one, and dropped his hands in exasperation. The back of his sweatshirt was lettered with the name BLACK JACKSON. “You never gonna knock the man out, you keep jabbin all the time,” Clarke said. “You had plenty opportunity for the left hand, now what were you waitin on, man, would you tell me?”

“I was waitin on an opening,” Jackson said.

“Man, there was openings like a hooker’s Saturday night,” Clarke said.

“Ain’t no sense throwin the left till there’s an opening,” Jackson said.

“You want to be the heavyweight champ of the world, or you want to be a dance star?” Clarke asked. “All I see you doin is dancin and jabbin, dancin and jabbin. You want to knock down a man the size of Jody there, you got to hit him. man. You got to knock his fuckin head off, not go dancin with him.” He turned abruptly from the ring and said, “What is it, Officers?”

“What you want us to do now?” Jackson asked.

“Go work out on the bag a while,” Clarke said over his shoulder.

“Which bag?”

“The big one.”

Jackson turned and began walking toward the far side of the ring. The larger fighter followed him. Together they ducked through the ropes. A loudspeaker erupted into the sweaty rhythm of the huge echoing room. “Andrew Henderson, call your mother. Andrew Henderson, call your mother.”

“So what is it?” Clarke asked.

“Jimmy and Isabel Harris,” Carella said.

“You’re kiddin me,” Clarke said. “What’ve I got to do with that?”

“Is it true you asked Sophie Harris to marry you?”

“That’s right,” Clarke said. “Listen, what is this, man? Is this you’re lookin for information about somebody you think done this thing, or is it you’re tryin to hang it on me? Cause, man, from what I read in the papers that boy was killed at around seven-thirty last night, and I was right here then, man, workin my fighter.”

“Don’t get excited,” Meyer said.

“I ain’t excited,” Clarke said. “I just know some things. You don’t get to be sixty years old in Diamond-back without gettin to know a few things.”

“What are these things you know, Mr. Clarke?”

“I know when a black man’s been killed, the cops go lookin for another black man. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’ll give you six-to-five it’s cause I’m black.”

“You’d lose,” Carella said.

“Then enlighten me,” Clarke said.

“We’re here because you asked Sophie Harris to marry you, and you know she’s contingent beneficiary of a twenty-five-thousand-dollar insurance policy. That’s why we’re here.”

“You think I killed those two kids so I could latch onto the twenty-five, is that it?”

“What time did you get here last night?”

“Shit, man, I got half a mind—”

“If you’re clean, we’ll be out of here in three minutes flat. Just tell us when you got here and when you left.”

“I was here at seven and I left at midnight.”

“Anybody see you?”

“I was workin with Warren and a sparring partner.”

“Warren?”

“Warren Jackson. My boy.”

“Who was the sparring partner? Same guy there?” “No, a kid named Donald Rivers. I don’t see him around, I don’t think he’s here right now.”

“Anybody else?”

“Only every fighter and manager in Diamondback. Warren’s got a fight Tuesday night. I been workin his ass off. Ask anybody in the gym — pick anybody you see on the floor — ask them was I here workin the boy last night. Seven o’clock to midnight. Had ring time from eight to nine, you can check that downstairs. Rest of the time I had him runnin and jumpin and punchin the bags and the whole damn shit.”

“Where’d you go when you left here?” Meyer said.

“Coffee shop up the street. I don’t know the name of it, everybody from the gym rolls in there. It’s right on the corner of Holman and 76th. They know me there, you ask them was I in there last night.”

“We’ll ask them,” Meyer said. “What’s your middle name?”

“None of your fuckin business,” Clarke said.

They checked around the gymnasium and learned that at least half a dozen people had seen Clarke on the premises the night before, between the hours of seven and midnight. They checked with the owner of the coffee shop up the street, and he told them Clarke and his fighter came in shortly after midnight last night, sat around talking till at least one in the morning, maybe one-thirty. According to the coroner’s report, Jimmy Harris had been slain sometime between six-thirty and seven-thirty p.m. He had been able to pinpoint the time so narrowly because the body was discovered almost immediately after the murder; rigor mortis, in fact, had not yet set in. With Isabel Harris, the latitude was wider; the coroner guessed she’d been killed sometime between ten p.m. and one a.m. In order to have killed Jimmy in Hannon Square at six-thirty, and then get uptown to the gym in Diamondback by seven o’clock, Charlie Clarke had to have moved faster than a speeding bullet. The logistics were impossible. Nor could he have got downtown again to the Harris apartment during the time span the coroner had estimated for Isabel’s murder.

This meant nothing.

In this city you could get somebody killed for fifty dollars. There was a possible twenty-five thousand dollars at stake here, and for a tenth of that you could hire a battalion of goons. They did not yet know whether the lab boys had lifted any good prints in the Harris apartment. In the meantime, and against that eventuality, they decided to request an I.D. run on Charles C. Clarke in the morning. It was almost eight o’clock when they left Diamondback. Carella dropped Meyer at the nearest subway station, and then drove home to Riverhead.