Ghosts

by Ed McBain

  But one man was somewhat impressed by the fact that the Department of Public Works—for such it had seemed—was out there doing its bit for this much-maligned city even on Christmas Day. He called the mayor’s office to congratulate whoever was manning the phones and got through to someone on the mayor’s newly installed Citizens’ Hotline, to whom he poured out his effusive praise. The lady who’d answered the phone suspiciously called the Department of Public Works immediately afterward, got no answer there, and called the superintendent of the department at home. The superintendent told her there had been no work orders issued to tear up the cobblestones on Gedney Avenue. He suggested that she call the police.

  So at 5:00 that evening, as the streetlamps came on and the shadows lengthened, Detectives Arthur Brown and Lou Moscowitz stood at one end of the block and looked at the same soil Indians must have trod in their moccasins centuries ago, when Columbus came to this hemisphere to start the whole she-bang. Shorn of its cobblestones from end to end, Gedney looked virginal and rustic. Brown and Moscowitz were grinning from ear to ear; even cops appreciated a daring rip-off every now and then.

  Carella, at home, felt guilty as hell. Not because someone had carted off a block of cobblestones but because Meyer had been shot twice in the leg. Had Carella switched holidays with him, then maybe Meyer wouldn’t have got shot. Maybe Carella would have got shot instead. Thinking about this, he felt a little less guilty. He’d been shot enough times, thanks—once just a few days before Christmas, in fact. But Carella was of Italian descent, and the Italians and Jews in this city shared guilt the way they shared matriarchal families. Carella had a cousin who, if he accidentally drove through a red traffic light, would stop in atonement at the green light on the next corner.

  So on Christmas night, at 8:00, Carella arrived at Mercy Hospital to tell Meyer how guilty he was feeling about not having got shot in Meyer’s place. Meyer was feeling guilty himself. It was Meyer’s contention that if he hadn’t been stupid enough to have got himself shot, then Bob O’Brien wouldn’t have been forced into the position of once again having to draw his gun and fire it. Meyer was worried about what this might do to O’Brien’s own feelings of guilt, even though O’Brien was Irish and consequently less prone.

  Carella had brought a pint of whiskey with him. He took it out of his coat pocket, poured a pair of generous shots into two sterile hospital glasses, and together the men drank to the undeniable fact that Meyer was still alive albeit a bit punctured. Carella poured a second pair of drinks, and the men drank to another day dawning tomorrow.

  The new Lineup Room, or Showup Room as it was alternately called, was in the basement of the station house, adjacent to the holding cells where booked prisoners were kept temporarily, awaiting transportation to the Criminal Courts Building downtown. This provided easy access to live bodies who—if they or their attorneys had no objections—could be paraded before a victim or a witness in the company of the true suspect the police hoped would be identified.

  In days of yore, a lineup of all felony offenders arrested the previous day would be held downtown at Headquarters every morning. The purpose of that bygone lineup was to acquaint detectives from all over the city with the people who were committing crimes here. Detectives attended lineups as often as they attended court. But whereas court appearances were necessary if convictions were to be had, somebody upstairs decided that the daily lineups were a drain on manpower and resulted in a minimum amount of future arrests since the people on the stage were headed for confinement anyway, some of them for life. The lineup was now a strictly local affair and conducted solely for the purpose of identification.

  The Lineup Room contained a narrow stage with height markers on the wall behind it and a hanging microphone above it. In front of the stage, and separating the stage from three rows of auditorium seats, was a floor-to-ceiling one-way mirror. The one-way mirror was sometimes called a two-way mirror by cops, but cops rarely agreed on anything except whose day off it was. One-way or two-way, it presented to the people lined up on the stage behind it only their own reflections. On the other side, the people sitting in the auditorium seats could look through what appeared to be a plate-glass window for an unobstructed, unobserved view of the men or women lined up beyond.

  The lineup that Tuesday morning, December 26, was being held for the express purpose of eliciting from Jerry Mandel a positive identification of Daniel Corbett. Carella had called Mandel at home first thing in the morning and was delighted to learn that the Harborview security guard had returned from his skiing trip without any broken bones. He had set up a time for the lineup and then had called Corbett first at home and then at Harlow House to ask if he would cooperate with the police in this matter. Corbett said he had nothing to hide—he had definitely not been the man who’d announced himself at Harborview on the night Craig was killed.

  From the holding cells next door, the detectives had selected half a dozen men roughly resembling Corbett—all of them with black hair and brown eyes. From the squadroom upstairs, they recruited Detectives Richard Genero and Jerry Barker, similarly hued. The prisoners, all wearing what they’d had on when arrested, presented a sartorial mix of sweaters, sports jackets, and—in the case of one gentleman pickpocket—a dapper pin-striped suit. Genero and Barker were wearing sports jackets. Daniel Corbett, who’d come to the precinct directly from Harlow House, was wearing a dark blue suit, a paler blue shirt, and a gold-and-blue silk rep tie. As the guest of honor he was allowed to choose his own position in the line. He elected to take the position fourth from the left. When all nine men had silently taken their places behind the one-way mirror, the spotlights went on over the stage. The auditorium beyond remained dark. Carella and Hawes were sitting together with Mandel in the second row center, flanking him.

  “Recognize anybody?” Carella said.

  “No, not yet,” Mandel said. He was, surprisingly for a skier, a chubby little man in his mid-fifties. He had told Carella, before the lineup, that he used to be a professional wrestler. Carella could not possibly imagine him throwing a hammerlock on anyone. Mandel kept staring at the men behind the plate glass.

  “Can I eliminate the ones it definitely wasn’t?” he asked.

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Well, it wasn’t the ones on either end there, and it wasn’t the one in the middle.”

  “Frank,” Carella said into the microphone on the stand before him, “you can take away Numbers One, Five, and Nine.” Genero was standing first in line; he slouched off the stage, looking oddly disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen the winner. The other two disqualified men were prisoners from the holding cells. In rapid sequence, Mandel eliminated two more of the prisoners and Detective Barker. There were now three men standing on the stage: the two remaining prisoners and Daniel Corbett.

  “Could they say something for me?” Mandel whispered.

  “Sure,” Carella said. “Gentlemen, would you mind saying in your normal voices, ‘I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.’ Number Four, we’ll start with you.”

  Number Four was Daniel Corbett. He cleared his throat and said, “I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.”

  “All right, Number Six,” Carella said.

  Number Six said, “I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.”

  “And Number Eight.”

  Number Eight said, “I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.”

  “What do you think?” Carella asked.

  “I can’t be certain…” Mandel said, and paused, “but I think it’s the one on the right. Number Eight.”

  Number Eight was a man named Anthony Ruggiero, who had been arrested early that morning for attempting to break down the door of an apartment just off Grover Avenue, three blocks from the police station. He was drunk at the time, and he claimed he thought it was his own apartment and that the woman who kept telling him to go away was his wife. Carella looked at Hawes, briefly a
nd bleakly, and then thanked Mandel. He went behind the one-way mirror a moment later, like a stage-door Johnny without flowers, and apologized to Corbett for having taken so much of his time.

  “So who the hell was it?” Carella asked Hawes.

  “Somebody Craig knew, that’s for sure.”

  “Had to be. Otherwise, why would he have let him into the apartment? And why would he have had a drink with him?”

  “That’s right, the autopsy…”

  “Right, he’d been drinking. In fact, he was drunk. But the lab techs couldn’t find alcohol traces in any of the glasses.”

  “Which means they were washed afterwards.”

  “Which doesn’t mean a thing if Craig was drinking alone. But Hillary told me he never drank while he was working. Never. We know he was working that afternoon because there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. And the sentence just trailed off, which makes it reasonable to believe he was interrupted—probably when the killer rang the doorbell. But he let him in, Cotton! He knew it wasn’t Corbett, and he let him in anyway. And if he never drank while he was working, then he had to have started drinking after he quit working. Which means he sat down to have a drink with the man who murdered him.”

  The two detectives looked at each other.

  “What do you think?” Hawes asked.

  “I don’t know what the hell to think. Maybe Craig thought it was just a friendly little visit, have a drink, make yourself comfortable, and out comes the knife.”

  “It’s the knife that bothers me,” Hawes said. “The fact that he brought the knife with him.”

  “Sure, that makes it premeditated.”

  “Murder One, pure and simple.”

  “Then why’d he accept a drink first?”

  “And what did they talk about between five o’clock and whenever it was he began hacking away?”

  The detectives looked at each other again.

  “Esposito?” Hawes asked.

  “Maybe,” Carella said. “He lived in the building, he could have presented himself as the member of some tenants’ committee or…”

  “Then who was it downstairs?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who announced himself as Corbett? That couldn’t have been Esposito.”

  “No,” Carella said. “Shit, let’s go talk to the Fire Department.”

  At Engine Company Number Six, a half hour later, they spoke to Terry Brogan, the moonlighting bartender. Brogan looked at the photograph of Warren Esposito, nodded, and said, “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Was he in Elmer’s Thursday night?” Carella asked.

  “What was Thursday? The twenty-second?”

  “The twenty-first.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I was working the bar that night.”

  “Did Esposito come in?”

  “Is that his name?”

  “Warren Esposito, yes. Did he…?”

  “Serve a guy drinks for months on end, never get to know his name,” Brogan said, and shook his head wonderingly.

  “Was he there Thursday night?”

  “Thursday night, Thursday night,” Brogan said, “let me see, what happened Thursday night?” He was thoughtful for several moments. From the second floor of the firehouse, spilling down through the hole surrounding the brass pole, Carella heard a voice saying, “Full boat, kings over.” Someone else said, “You’ve got a fuckin’ horseshoe up your ass.”

  “I think Thursday was the night the redhead took off her blouse,” Brogan said.

  “When was that? What time?”

  “Musta been about six o’clock,” Brogan said. “She came in bombed, and she had three more drinks in an hour. Yeah, it musta been about six. What it was, some guy sitting at the bar said she had to be wearing falsies, tits like that. So she took off her blouse to show him she wasn’t.”

  “Was Esposito there?” Carella said patiently.

  “He coulda been. With all that excitement…I mean, who was looking anyplace but the redhead’s chest?”

  “What time did you start work last Thursday?” Hawes said, figuring he’d come in by the side door.

  “Four-thirty.”

  “Esposito told us he was there at five-thirty.”

  “He coulda been.”

  “What time did the redhead come in?”

  “An hour before she took off her blouse.”

  “That would’ve been five o’clock, right?”

  “Yeah, about five.”

  “Okay, were you the only one tending bar at five o’clock?”

  “Sure.”

  “So you were serving the redhead.”

  “Right.”

  “So between five and six there was no excitement. Nothing to distract you. So can you try to remember whether or not Warren Esposito came in at five-thirty?”

  “Look at the picture again,” Carella said.

  Brogan looked at the picture again. Carella found himself wondering how the man would behave in a four-alarm fire. What would happen if he hacked his way into a blazing bedroom and found a bare-breasted redhead in there? Would he forget his own name? Would he jump to the street six stories below without a net under him? Would he turn his hose on an open window?

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Brogan said.

  “What’s right?” Carella asked, wondering if he’d stumbled across another psychic.

  “Rob Roys. He drinks Rob Roys. Right. I served the redhead a Manhattan, and then the old fart up the bar a gin on the rocks, and then he came in and ordered a Rob Roy.”

  “Esposito?”

  “Yeah, the guy in the picture here.”

  “What time?”

  “Well, if the redhead came in at five…Yeah, it musta been five-thirty or thereabouts. Like he said.”

  “What time did he leave?” Carella asked.

  “That’s hard to say,” Brogan said. “Because of all the excitement with the redhead.”

  “Was he there when the redhead took off her blouse?”

  “I’m pretty sure he was. Let me think a minute.”

  Carella watched him while he thought a minute. Carella imagined he was reconstructing the entire exciting event in his mind. In all his years of police work he had never known an alibi to hinge on a redhead’s breasts. But the redhead had come in at 5:00 and taken off her blouse at 6:00, and they had just established that Esposito was there at about 5:30. If Carella had wanted to pull teeth for a living, he would’ve become a dentist. It seemed, though, that they would have to work Brogan’s mouth from bicuspid to molar to canine, tooth by tooth, till they got what they were after.

  Brogan began counting off imaginary people lined up along the bar, using the forefinger of his left hand. “Abner at the end of the bar, near the juke, scotch and soda. The secretary from Halston, Inc., next to him, vodka tonic. Then your guy here, Rob Roy. Next to him a guy I never saw before, bourbon and water. Then the redhead, Manhattans. And next to her the guy who made the comment about her tits, also who I never saw before, Canadian and soda. So that’s who was there at six o’clock, just before she took off the blouse. So, yeah, your guy was still there at six.”

  “How do you know it was six?” Hawes asked.

  “The news was just coming on. On television. We have a television set over the bar. That’s what started the whole thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This girl they got doing the six o’clock news. What’s her name? I forget her name.”

  “I don’t know her name,” Hawes said.

  “But you know who I mean, don’t you? Her and this guy do the news together. The six o’clock news.”

  “Well, what about her?” Hawes said.

  “Somebody said she had great tits—the girl on television—and the redhead said they were falsies, and the guy sitting next to the redhead said something about hers being falsies, too, and that was when she took off her blouse to prove they weren’t.” Brogan grinned appreciatively. “Believe me, they were definitely not falsies.”

&
nbsp; “So Esposito was there at six o’clock when the news came on and the blouse came off,” Carella said.

  “Right.”

  “Was he still there at six-thirty?”

  “Six-thirty, six-thirty,” Brogan said. “Let me think a minute.”

  Carella looked at Hawes. Hawes let out his breath through his nose.

  “The boss came in about ten minutes after six,” Brogan said. “He sees the redhead sitting there at the bar starkers from the waist up, he says, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ He thinks she’s a hooker or something, you know? He tells her to get the hell out of there, he don’t want hookers lining up at his bar, bringing heat down on the place. Just between us, he collects numbers on the side. So, naturally, he don’t want some cop coming in there to bust a hooker and accidentally tumbling to the numbers operation.” His voice lowered confidentially. “I’m telling you this because we’re all civil service employees,” he said. “I don’t want to cause the guy no trouble.”

  “All right, so the boss came in at six-ten,” Hawes said. “Was Esposito there when the boss came in?”

  “Yeah, he joined in the chorus.”

  “What chorus?”

  “Everybody told the boss to shut up and leave the redhead alone.”

  “Then what?”

  “The boss told her to put on her blouse and get out of there before he called the police. He wasn’t really going to call no police because then he might get the kind of trouble he wasn’t looking for; he was just kind of threatening her, you know?”

  “Did she put on the blouse?” Carella asked.

  “She put on the blouse.”

  “At ten minutes after six?”

  “At a quarter after six.”

  “Then what?”

  “She left. No, wait. First she called the boss a tight-assed son of a bitch. Then she left.”