Long Time No See

Nine

The city for which Carella worked was divided into five separate and distinct sections, but only the island of Isola was referred to as “the city.” If you lived out in Calm’s Point or up in Riverhead, if you lived across the bridge in Majesta or out in the middle of the river on Bethtown, whenever you went into Isola, you were “going to the city.” Once you were in the city, you were either uptown, downtown or midtown. If you were all the way uptown and about to cross one of the bridges into Riverhead, you would never say you were going further uptown; you were, instead, going to Riverhead. If you were in Riverhead and heading downtown, you were going to the city. If you were in the midtown area of the city and heading for the financial area and finally the Old Port, you were still going downtown. And if you were standing in the middle of Van Buren Circle and about to head for the midtown area, you were likewise going downtown.

Crosstown was quite another matter.

For the convenience of out-of-towners, the founding fathers being considerate as well as foresighted, the city was constructed on a simple grid pattern, Hall Avenue skewering it from east to west and dividing Isola into almost equal halves. Bounding the island on the north was the River Harb, the Hamilton Bridge crossing it uptown, Castleview River sitting on its shoreline upstate. The Harb was long and wide and dirty, and nowhere was it wider and dirtier than where the Taslough Straits Bridge was built across it further upstate, a con-tracting-cum-graft coup in the years immediately following the Second World War. The district attorney investigating the scandal was himself later indicted — but that’s another story, kids. On the southern side of Isola was the River Dix, a favorite spot in the thirties for the dumping of corpses wearing cement slippers. Such activity had since been removed to Spindrift Airport out on Sand’s Point, where the bodies of gangsters were all too often found moldering in the locked trunks of late-model automobiles. The streets running parallel to Hall Avenue on either side of it all joined together and turned upon themselves at the Old Port, where you could board a ferry to Bethtown or take a tunnel to Majesta or Calm’s Point, or simply ride back around the island again till you got to the Devil’s Break uptown and crossed over into Riverhead. It was a confusing city, but better than Tokyo. Better even than Biloxi, no offense.

The lady had been killed in the midtown area.

For simplicity’s sake, and having nothing whatever to do with territorial imperative or departmental seniority, the midtown area was divided by the police into two geographical sections called Midtown East and Midtown West, which chopped the island in half across its waist rather than severing it bilaterally from the top of its skull to the tips of its toes. Once upon a time the midtown area used to be divided lengthwise rather than bellybutton-wise, and the police called those two sections Midtown North and Midtown South. But that was when chariots were running in the cobbled streets. The city was confusing, yes, but the Police Department was even more confusing. The British monetary system used to be confusing, too, but all things change for the better eventually.

Things were never going to change for the better as concerned the dead woman lying at the foot of the steps leading up to the second floor. The detective who caught the squeal in Midtown East was a man named Bruno Tauber. When Tauber’s grandparents first came to America, there was an umlaut over the “a.” The name was spelled Tauber then. The umlaut indicated that the “äu” was to be sounded as “oy.” As part of the naturalization process, the umlaut was eventually dropped, the name was spelled Tauber and pronounced to rhyme with “tower.” Not even Tauber himself knew the difference. That’s the way his father pronounced it. That’s the way his mother and brothers pronounced it. And that’s the way he pronounced it. Tauber. To rhyme with tower. Only his grandparents would have known the difference, but they were dead, and maybe they might have agreed that all things changed for the better eventually.

Tauber looked down at the dead woman. There was blood all over the landing, blood on the keys of the accordion — shit, was there ever a Saturday night that went by in this city without a fuckin homicide?

“Where’s the man called it in?” Tauber asked the patrolman at his elbow.

“Down the hall there,” the patrolman said. “Guy in the gray sweater there.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, thanks,” Tauber said. “Don’t touch nothin, you hear?”

“Why would I touch anything?” the patrolman asked.

“That’s exactly what I’m sayin,” Tauber said, and walked toward the other end of the landing, where a man stood just outside the door to apartment 1 A.

The man appeared to be in his late fifties, thin and balding, with gray hair spraying out from behind each ear and combed sideways across his flaking pate. He was wearing rumpled black trousers and a gray sweater over an undershirt. The sweater had bum holes in it; Tauber automatically concluded that the man was a pipe smoker. Either that, or he had tried repeatedly to set fire to himself. Black-rimmed spectacles were perched on the man’s nose. Behind the glasses, his brown eyes darted nervously. As Tauber approached, the man scratched his chin. He needed a shave. Tauber figured he hadn’t been out tonight. Saturday night, and he’d been home. He made a mental note.

“You the man found the body?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“What’s your name?”

“Gerald Epstein.”

“Who is she, do you know her?” Tauber asked, gesturing with his head toward the body at the other end of the hall.

“She’s a very good friend of mine. Her name is Hester Mathieson, she lives upstairs on the second floor.”

“How’d you come across the body?”

“What do you mean?”

“How’d you happen to be out here in the hall? Were you coming home from someplace?”

“No, I was going downstairs for some milk. I ran out of milk.”

“What time was this?”

“About a quarter to eight.”

“How’d you happen to see her there at the other end of the hall?”

“I just saw her, that’s all.”

“Went over to her, did you?”

“Yes.”

“Recognize her right away?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do then?”

“I went back to my apartment and called the police.”

“What time was that?”

“A few minutes later. Right after I found her.”

“Hear anything out here before then?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all, huh? No screams, no sounds of a struggle, nothing like that.”

“Nothing. I had the television on.”

“You were home all night, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t hear anything, though.”

“No.”

“What’d you say her name was?”

“Hester Mathieson.”

“Spell the last name for me, would you?”

“M-a-t-h-i-e-s-o-n.”

“How old is she, would you know?”

“Sixty-three.”

“Got any relatives that you know of?”

“She had a niece who used to come around, but she moved to Chicago.”

“When was that?”

“About six months ago.”

“What’s her name?”

“Stephanie Welles.”

“Would you know where she lives in Chicago?”

“On Warrington Avenue someplace. I’m not sure of the address. Whenever Hester got a letter from her, she’d ask me to read it out loud.”

“Didn’t she know how to read?”

“What do you mean?”

“Hester. The dead woman.”

“She was blind,” Epstein said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Blind?”

“Didn’t you see the white cane?”

“No,” Tauber said, “I didn’t notice it. Blind, huh?”

Carella had just finished dinner when the telephone rang. He was sitting in the living room, looking at the mantel clock and planning to take his wife to bed. It was only nine p.m., the twins were already asleep, Fanny was watching television in the spare room, and the condition inspired by Janet up there at Fort Mercer had metamorphosed into a very real and earnest desire for Teddy, who — judging from the various provocative and insinuating postures she was striking across the room as she read a magazine — seemed to be contemplating the same sort of evening activity Carella had in mind. When the phone rang he looked immediately at the mantel clock, and then sighed and crossed the room to where the phone rested on a low table just off the entry. He lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” he said.

“Yeah, Jet me talk to Detective Carella, huh?” a man’s voice said.

“Who’s this?”

“Tauber, Midtown East.”

“What is it, Tauber?”

“I got a stiff here at 1144 North Pierce, lady with her throat slit.”

“What about her?”

“She’s blind. We had a stop-sheet here the other day — I checked back with the squad a few minutes ago, got your name as the officer making the request, and called the Eight-Seven. Desk sergeant put me onto you at home. I hope I ain’t interrupting anything.”

“No, no,” Carella said.

“You want to come down here, or what? I think this should be your baby, don’t you? I just checked it out with one of the guys Homicide sent over. He thinks there won’t be no problem transferring the case if it looks like the same thing we’re dealing with here. Whyn’t you come down and have a look? The M.E.’s just about done with her, I already requested a policewoman to search her. I ain’t trying to avoid work, but if this is the same killer we got here, you really should pick up on it.”

“I’ll leave right now,” Carella said.

“We got plenty to do meanwhile,” Tauber said. “That’s 1144—”

“I’ve got it.”

“See you later,” Tauber said, and hung up.

They all looked the same.

The crime scenes looked the same, identical radio motor patrol cars angled into the curb, dome lights flashing, only the numbers on their sides varying from precinct to precinct. The police barricades looked the same, crosspieces painted in black-and-white diagonal stripes and sitting on sawhorses with cardboard signs tacked to them — Crime Scene — Do Not Enter. Bold black against white as pale as death, they all looked the same. The cops looked the same, too, winter or summer, spring or fall, nothing changed but the seasons in this city, and sometimes not even those. The uniformed patrolmen always seemed a bit awed by the crime of murder, urging pedestrians to move right along, nothing here to see, folks, let’s keep it moving, but empathizing with them completely when it came to their curiosity, almost as if they were not part of the law-enforcement team but were instead on the civilian fringes, watching agape. It was a cold night. In this city, years ago, the patrolmen wore heavy blue overcoats in the wintertime, but now they simply wore long johns under their trousers and tunics, giving some of them a heftier look than when they were naked in their own showers. They milled about talking in whispers except when they were moving pedestrian traffic. What they whispered about was murder.

The detectives all looked the same, too. Tall men, burly for the most part; Carella often had the feeling that detectives were chosen from the uniformed force on the basis of their size and not their special ability to make reasonable deductions or even wild guesses. Most of them were hatless. Most of them smoked cigarettes endlessly. Many of them wore short car coats or zippered jackets with sweater cuffs and bottoms. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the detectives at a crime scene were part of a bowling team.

The Homicide cops were immediately identifiable; they all looked and sounded like Monoghan and Monroe, the perfect prototypes, the others being slightly marred castings from the same mold. Black was the color still favored by many of the older Homicide bulls. Black for death. There had once been a famous Homicide cop named Saunders who wore black almost from head to toe. His exploits were legendary, they called him the Black Plague. Black pants, black suit, black tie on a stark white shirt, black overcoat in the wintertime, black bowler he’d bought one time in London when he’d gone to visit his grandparents and was treated like a visiting celebrity at Scotland Yard. Black umbrella when it was raining, called it his “brolly,” picked that up from Grandma sitting in her row house along Jubilee Street. Used to crack Homicide cases as if they were walnuts. This was in the days when Homicide truly used to investigate a case, not like today when the precinct detective handled it. Other Homicide cops started wearing black, too. It became the mark of their elitism. You saw a plainclothes cop in black, you knew he was a Homicide dick. Even some of the garden-variety precinct detectives took to wearing black in hope they’d be mistaken for men from Homicide.

That was then, Gertie. Today, except for the old-timers, your Homicide cops were identifiable only by the proprietary air they brought to the scene of a murder, rather like comfortable burghers looking out over their vast holdings. The shields pinned to their overcoats were similar in every respect to the shields the precinct detectives wore — blue enamel set in a gold sunburst pattern — except for the single word Homicide stamped into the gold beneath the word Detective. Every detective at the crime scene had his shield pinned to his coat or his jacket. The detectives all looked the same.

The woman lying in angular disarray on the first-floor landing looked like any other homicide victim — they all looked the same. When you’d seen enough fatal wounds, they all began to lose defining characteristics except to the medical examiner. It made little difference whether the wound was inflicted by shotgun or knife, pistol or hatchet, baseball bat or ice pick, the results were the same, the results reminded a working cop day in and day out that life was fragile. But it reminded him of something else as well, and it was this that made his job so very difficult. It reminded him that life was cheap. It reminded him that death could be bought suddenly and senselessly — to Carella, it would always be senselessly. To Carella, there was never a good or valid reason for murder.

A pair of ambulance attendants lifted the body onto the stretcher. One of them started to throw a rubber sheet over it. Carella identified himself and told them to wait a minute, he wanted to have a look at her.

“We been told to remove her from the premises,” one of the attendants said.

“Right, and I’m asking you to hold a minute, okay?” Carella said.

“It’s the M.E. says when to take a stiff or when not to take it,” the attendant said. “Anyway, who are you? Are you the investigating officer here? I thought the other guy was the investigating officer.”

Carella didn’t answer him. He was stooping beside the body, looking into the dead woman’s face as though trying to read the identity of the murderer there. The neck wound was gaping and raw; he turned away. Her hands had been put in plastic bags, par for the course when the weapon was a knife and the attack proximate. No dutiful M.E. would have neglected the possibility that the victim may have scratched out in self-defense and might be carrying under her fingernails samples of the murderer’s skin or blood.

“All right, you can take her,” Carella said.

“You dope it out yet?” the attendant asked sarcastically. “You figured who done it?”

Carella rose from where he’d been kneeling beside the body. He did not say a word. He looked directly into the attendant’s eyes. The attendant visibly flinched, and then bent silently to cover the corpse with the rubber sheet. Silently, he and his partner picked up the stretcher and carried it down the stairs.

“You Carella?” a voice said behind him.

Carella turned. The man was a detective, his shield pinned to the pocket of his tweed overcoat. Fleshy, thickset man with blue eyes and blond hair. Smoking a cigar. Stunk up the hallway with the stench of it.

“Tauber?” Carella asked.

“Yeah,” Tauber said. “You got here, huh?”

“I got here.”

The men did not shake hands. Law-enforcement officers rarely shook hands with each other. Even at dances thrown by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association or the Emerald Society, they did not shake hands. It was a peculiar occupational quirk, Carella thought. In days of yore, knights used to shake hands to make certain the haft of a dagger was not concealed in a closed fist, the blade hidden along the arm. Maybe cops had no daggers to hide.

“Did you see her?” Tauber asked.

“I got a look at her, yes.”

“Policewoman searched her a little while ago. I’ve got her stuff waiting to go to the property clerk, I wanted you to see it first. You know a Homicide cop named Young?”

“No.”

“He’s the one told me you could take charge here if it looks like we got the same killer. I realize a slit throat’s a slit throat. But if I remember your stop-sheet, both victims were blind, and nothing was stolen, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, the lady had twenty-two dollars and fifty cents in her handbag, and she was wearing a gold crucifix around her neck, and also a gold ring with a small diamond on her right hand. Whoever killed her didn’t take the money or the jewelry, left a good accordion, too — it’s over there against the wall, I already had it tagged, got to be worth a couple of hundred, don’t you think? So robbery wasn’t the motive here. All I’m saying is it looks like a similar M.O. to me.”

“Yes, it does,” Carella said.

“I’m not trying to duck out of this,” Tauber said, “believe me. I got a full caseload right now, but what the hell, one more or less ain’t going to break me. It’s just I really think this might be yours.”

“I understand that Who found the body?”

“Guy down the hall. I only asked him a few questions, you’ll want to talk to him some more if you’ll be takin this over. What do you think? Do you think you’ll be takin this over?”

“I guess so,” Carella said.

“Do you want me to hang around, or what?”

“How do we work the paper on this?”

“I guess I file with Homicide, I don’t know. I got Young’s verbal okay, that should be enough, don’t you think?”

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. When I get back to the station house, I’ll give Homicide a call, find out how they want us to handle the paper, okay? If you want to ring me later. I’ll tell you what they suggest. What I think personally is you just handle it like it’s your squeal.”

“All the way downtown here?”

“On the basis of your stop-sheet,” Tauber said, and shrugged. “You asked for dope on a pair of unusual crimes, right? Well, now you got another homicide looks related. You ask me, that's enough.”

“You think the stop-sheet would cover it, huh?”

“That’s my opinion.”

“I just don’t want to get involved in a bunch of departmental bullshit,” Carella said. “That’s the one thing I don’t need on a homicide.”

“Naw, don’t worry.”

“For example, what do we do with her valuables? Does the Eight-Seven’s property clerk get them, or do I send them over to Midtown East?”

“I think your man gets them.”

“That’s what I think,” Carella said.

“That’s what I think, too.”

“Where’s the stuff?”

“There wasn’t much, aside from the cash and the jewelry,” Tauber said. “I got it bagged there against the wall, you want to take a look at it.” He led Carella to where the woman’s accordion was resting against the wall alongside a brown paper bag. The accordion was tagged, and so was the bag. Carella picked up the bag and peeked into it.

“Okay to touch this stuff?” he asked.

“It’s your case,” Tauber said, and shrugged.

“I mean, have the lab boys gone over it?”

“Only the stuff might’ve had latents. The wallet there, and the hairbrush and the address book. The book’s in Braille, it ain’t going to help you much.”

“But it’s okay to have a look at it, huh?”

“Yeah, go ahead. They dusted it already.”

Carella reached into the bag and took out the address book. The book was, in actuality, a small black loose-leaf binder, some three inches in width, five inches in overall length. The pages inside were unlined, most of them punched with a series of dots. Top line, middle line, bottom line, space, and then another line. Carella assumed these constituted the name, address and telephone number for each listing.

“I wonder how they do that,” Tauber said. “Blind people.”

“They probably have some kind of instrument they use,” Carella said.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Do you think there’s anybody in the department who can translate this stuff?”

“You’ll probably have to go to Languages and Codes,” Tauber said.

“Here’s something,” Carella said. He had turned to the inside back cover of the book. Pasted to it was a message in somewhat shaky longhand:

“Guess she figured...”

“Yeah,” Carella said.

“She had to write it in longhand, otherwise...”

“Yeah.”

“But it won’t do you no good, anyway,” Tauber said. “The address is an old one. She moved to Chicago six months ago.”

“Where in Chicago?”

“Someplace on Warrington Avenue.”

“Who is she?”

“The woman’s niece.”

“Any other relatives?”

“Not that I know of.”

“She should be contacted,” Carella said.

“You can check the apartment for letters soon as the lab boys are through. You might find an address.”

Before World War I, Pershing Avenue used to be called Grant Avenue. Architecturally, the wide esplanade looked much as it did then. A central divider planted with forsythia bushes and maple trees, leafless now in mid-November. Huge buildings on either side of the avenue, granite cornerstones, limestone facades. Spacious entry courts with concrete flowerpots sitting atop brick pedestals. In the days before World War I, the buildings lining Grant Avenue constituted some of the city’s choicest real estate. They were now scribbled over with graffiti advertising the name of this or that streetgang member. The graffiti was oversprayed — Spider 19 giving way to Dagger 21, in turn giving way to Salazar IV, so that nobody’s name meant a rat’s ass any more.

Maybe Spider 19 felt the same way Grant in heaven must have felt when they changed the name of the avenue to Pershing. Pershing himself had narrowly missed having the name changed again to Kennedy shortly after the assassination, when even lampposts were being named after the late President. Up there in heaven, old John Joseph, for such was the general’s name, most likely began muttering about sic transit gloria mundi and the high cost of changing street signs. But someone had the good sense to recognize that Roosevelt Street, some three blocks away from Pershing Avenue, had already had its name changed to Kennedy Street and another name-change of yet another thoroughfare might prove confusing to pedestrians and motorists alike. The people along Pershing Avenue were grateful. None of them knew General Pershing from a hole in the wall, and none of them would ever forget that bleak assassination day in November as long as they lived, so they didn’t need street names changed, they didn’t need that bullshit at all.

Carella parked his car two blocks from 1847 Pershing, the closest spot he could find, and began walking against the wind blowing through the naked chestnut trees. He had searched Hester Mathieson’s apartment for any back correspondence from Stephanie Welles and had found none; he guessed there was no reason for a blind woman to have saved letters that had to be read to her aloud. He had then called the post office serving the Pershing Avenue area to ask about a forwarding address that might have been filed six months ago, and the night clerk who answered the phone told him he’d have to call back in the morning, the only people there right now were sorting mail and moving it out. He then checked the address in Hester’s book against the Isola telephone directory and came up with an identical listing for Stephanie Welles. The possibility existed that she had sublet the apartment to someone she knew; Carella dialed the number. He let it ring twelve times, and then hung up.

It was ten p.m. by then.

Tauber had left the scene some forty minutes earlier, promising to check Homicide in an attempt to learn how the transfer to the Eight-Seven should be handled. When Carella called him at five past the hour, Tauber said he had spoken again to Young, and the Homicide cop would be sending out written authorization to the commanding officers at both Midtown East and the Eight-Seven, so that was that. He wished Carella luck with the case. Carella wanted to get a line on Stephanie Welles now, tonight, before this one began to get cold, too. He drove to Pershing Boulevard hoping for one of two things: either the person who’d rented the apartment after her knew where Stephanie Welles was now living in Chicago, or else Stephanie had left a forwarding address with the superintendent of the building. He was less interested in notifying her of her aunt’s death than he was in soliciting information from her. He did not know how much she knew about the dead woman’s habits or acquaintances, but she’d been listed as the person to call in case of an emergency or an accident, and Hester Mathieson had suffered the biggest accident of them all.

He walked with his head ducked.

The wind was shrill.

He saw the graffiti-marked buildings, and tried to understand — but could not.

His grandfather had come to America from Italy because he’d been told the streets here were paved with gold. They were not, of course, and Giovanni Carella learned that almost at once, driving a horse and wagon for the milk company, the horse dropping the only golden nuggets anywhere in view. Nor were the streets as clean as those to be found in Giovanni’s native Naples, or so Giovanni claimed, a premise perhaps disputable. But in those days, when Carella’s grandfather first got here at the turn of the century, the European sense of tradition and of place caused immigrants like himself to look upon even their slum dwellings as something to be cared for with pride. The buildings — your own building and the building next door and the one next door to that — were home. Together they formed “la vicinanza” and you did not defile your home, you did not shit where you ate. No one would have dreamt of scribbling upon the face of a tenement, however grim the building was. No one would have marked a trolley car — the subways were in the process of being built, there were no subway cars to mark — because these were people who had lived with beauty centuries-old, and they were not yet used to the fact that in America things existed only to be changed or destroyed.

Carella climbed the flat wide steps of the front stoop, past a pair of empty concrete urns, each scribbled over with undecipherable names. He moved across the courtyard toward the entrance doors of the building. Two young boys were playing boxball in the illuminated courtyard. They looked up at him as he went past, and then went back to their game. He entered the outer lobby of the building, and was searching the mailboxes for the super’s apartment number when he came across the name S. WELLES in the slot under the mailbox for apartment 54. He didn’t know exactly what this meant. Had Stephanie Welles kept the apartment here in Isola while living in Chicago? Or had it been sublet or otherwise rented to someone who’d simply neglected to change the name in the box?

He pressed the bell-button under the box. Nothing. He pressed it again, ready to reach for the inner-lobby door when the buzz sounded. Nothing came. At the end of the row of mailboxes, he found the super’s box, and pressed the button under it. He waited several moments and was about to press it again when an answering buzz came. Leaping for the handle on the lobby door, he opened the door and stepped into a larger space that was dry with contained heat. Against the wall on his left, a pair of radiators hissed and whistled. A single elevator with a pair of spray-painted brass doors was on the rear wall. On the right of the lobby, taped to the wall there, Carella saw a piece of cardboard with the word Super hand-lettered onto it, a black arrow under it. He followed the arrow and knocked on the door to apartment 10. A man’s voice said, “Yeah, who is it?”

“Police,” Carella said.

“Who?”

“Police.”

“Shit,” the man said.

Carella waited. Behind the door he could hear shuffling and muttering, those famous vaudeville performers. At last the door opened. The superintendent was a white man in his late sixties, Carella guessed, wearing rumpled blue trousers, a tank-top white undershirt and badly scruffed red velveteen house slippers. He looked grizzled and bleary-eyed. Through the open door to the room beyond the kitchen, Carella could see the edge of the bed with the covers thrown back. He suspected he’d wakened the superintendent, and further suspected he would not be overly receptive to questions about Stephanie Welles. The super’s tone immediately confirmed all suspicions.

“Well, what is it?” he said.

“Sorry to bother you this time of night,” Carella said.

“Yeah, well you already bothered me, so what is it?”

“I’m investigating a homicide, and I’d—”

“Somebody in this building?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“I’m trying to locate a woman named Stephanie Welles. I thought she might have—”

“She ain’t home,” the super said.

Carella looked at him.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Working. She works nights.”

“You mean she still lives here?” Carella asked.

“Of course she lives here. Why are you here looking for her if she don’t live here?”

“She doesn’t live in Chicago?”

“Do I live in Chicago? Do you live in Chicago?”

“I thought she’d moved to Chicago.”

“No, she ain’t moved to Chicago.”

“Where does she work, can you tell me that?”

“You planning to bust her?”

“What for?”

“It’s legal what she does.”

“What does she do?”

“I won’t tell you where she works if you’re planning to go there and bust her.”

“I want to ask her some questions about the woman who was killed.”

“What woman?”

“Her name is Hester Mathieson, would you know her?”

“No.”

“Would you know anyone named Jimmy Harris?”

“No.”

“Or Isabel Harris?”

“No.”

“Ever hear Miss Welles mention any of those people?”

“I don’t know her that good,” the super said. “I only know she works nights, and I know that what she does is legal. So if you’re going to go running down there tryin to bust her—”

“Running down where?”

“Where she works.”

“Where’s that?”

“I ain’t tellin you,” the super said, and started to close the door. Carella put his foot into the wedge. “Get your foot out of there,” the super said.

“I can find out where she works,” Carella said. “But that’ll mean more trouble for me.”

“So?”

“So then I’ll come back about your garbage cans.”

“My garbage cans are fine.”

“Or the pipes in your basement. Or the electrical wiring. Mister, I’ll find something, believe me. I’m very good at finding something.”

“I’ll bet,” the super said. “But you ain’t gonna find Stephanie Welles by threatening me.”

“Where does she work?” Carella said. “And stop pushing that damn door against my foot.”

“You going to bust her?”

“I’m going to question her about a homicide victim.”

“She didn’t kill nobody.”

“I thought you didn’t know her too well.”

“I know her well enough to know she didn’t kill nobody.”

“Where does she work?”

“Place called The Tahitian Gardens.”

“What is it, a massage parlor?”

“It’s a health club.”

“Sure,” Carella said.

“It’s legal,” the super said.

Carella took his foot out of the door, and the super slammed it shut.