Eight Black Horses

by Ed McBain

  The Carella house in Riverhead was a huge white elephant they’d picked up for a song shortly after Teddy Carella gave birth to the twins. At about the same time, Teddy’s father presented them with a registered nurse as a month-long gift while Teddy was getting her act together, and Fanny Knowles had elected to stay on with them at a salary they could afford, telling them she was tired of carrying bedpans for sick old men.

  A lot of cops ribbed Carella about Fanny. They told him they didn’t know any other cop on the force who was rich enough to have a housekeeper, even one who had blue hair and wore a pince-nez. They said he had to be on the take. Carella admitted that being able to afford live-in help was decidedly difficult these days; the numbers boys in Riverhead were always so late paying off. Actually Fanny was worth her weight—a hundred and fifty pounds—in pure gold. She ran the house with all the tenderness of a Marine Corps drill sergeant, and she was fond of saying, ‘I take no shit from man nor beast,’ an expression the ten-year-old twins had picked up when they were learning to talk and which Mark now used with more frequency than April. In fact, the twins’ speech patterns—much to Carella’s consternation—were more closely modeled after Fanny’s than anyone else’s; Teddy Carella was a deaf mute, and it was Fanny’s voice the twins heard around the house whenever Carella wasn’t home.

  When the phone rang at three o’clock that Thanksgiving Day, Fanny was washing dishes in the kitchen. Her hands were soapy but she answered the phone anyway. Whenever she and Teddy were alone in the house, she had to answer the phone, of course. But even when Carella was home, she normally picked up because she wanted to make sure it wasn’t some idiot detective calling about something that could easily wait till morning.

  ‘Carella residence,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, hello?’ a woman’s voice said.

  ‘Hello?’ Fanny said.

  ‘Yes, I’m trying to get in touch with Detective Steve Carella. Have I got the right number?’

  ‘This is the Carella residence, yes,’ Fanny said.

  ‘Is there a Detective Steve Carella there?’

  ‘Who’s this, please?’ Fanny said.

  ‘Naomi Schneider.’

  ‘Is this police business, Miss Schneider?’

  ‘Well ... uh ... yes.’

  ‘Are you a police officer, Miss Schneider?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what’s this in reference to, please?’

  It wasn’t often that a civilian called here at the house, but sometimes they did, even though the number was listed in the book as ‘Carella, T. F.,’ for Theodora Franklin Carella. Not too many cops listed their home numbers in the telephone directories; this was because not too many crooks enjoyed being sent up the river, and some of them came out looking for revenge. The way things were nowadays, most of them got out ten minutes after you locked them up. These days, when you threw away the key, it came back at you like a boomerang.

  ‘I’d rather discuss it with him personally,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Well, he’s finishing his dinner just now,’ Fanny said. ‘May I take a message?’

  ‘I wonder if you could interrupt him, please,’ Naomi said.

  ‘I’d rather not do that,’ Fanny said. ‘They’re just having their coffee. If you’ll give me your number...’

  ‘They?’ Naomi said.

  ‘Him and Mrs. Carella, yes.’

  There was a long silence on the line.

  ‘His mother, do you mean?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘No, his wife. Miss Schneider, he’ll be back in the office tomorrow if you’d like to...’

  ‘Are you sure I have the right number?’ Naomi said. ‘The Detective Carella I have in mind isn’t married.’

  ‘Well, this one is,’ Fanny said. She was beginning to get a bit irritated.

  ‘Detective Steve Carella, right?’ Naomi said.

  ‘Yes, Miss, that’s who lives here,’ Fanny said. ‘If you’d like to give me a number where he can reach you...’

  ‘No, never mind,’ Naomi said. ‘Thank you.’

  And hung up.

  Fanny frowned. She replaced the receiver on the wall hook, dried her hands on a dish towel, and went out into the dining room. She could hear the television set down the hallway turned up full blast, the twins giggling at yet another animated cartoon; Thanksgiving Day and all you got was animated cats chasing animated mice. Carella and Teddy were sitting at the dining room table, finishing their second cups of coffee.

  ‘Who was that?’ Carella asked.

  ‘Somebody wanting a Detective Steve Carella,’ Fanny said.

  ‘Well, who?’

  ‘A woman named Naomi Schneider.’

  ‘What?’ Carella said.

  ‘Got the wrong Carella,’ Fanny said, and looked at him. ‘The one she wanted ain’t married.’

  Teddy was reading her lips. She looked at Carella questioningly.

  ‘Did you get a number?’ he asked. ‘Did she leave a number?’

  ‘She hung up,’ Fanny said, and looked at Carella again. ‘You ought to tell people not to bring police business into your home,’ she said, and went out into the kitchen again.

  * * * *

  Josie was only fourteen years old. That was the problem. She shouldn’t have been in the park in the first place, not at one o’clock in the morning, and certainly not doing what she’d been doing. She had told her parents she’d be spending the night at Jessica Cartwright’s house, which was true, but she hadn’t told them that Jessica’s parents didn’t care what time Jessica came in or that she and Jessica wouldn’t be studying for a big French exam, as she’d told them, but instead would be out with two seventeen-year-old boys.

  Seventeen-year-old boys were exciting.

  Actually all boys were exciting.

  She and Jessica and the two boys had gone to a movie and then Eddie—who was the boy Jessica had fixed her up with—suggested that they take a little stroll in the park, it being such a nice night and all. This was back in October, when the weather was acting so crazy and you could walk around in just a skirt and sweater, which was what Josie was wearing that night. October twenty-fourth, a Monday night. She remembered the date because the French exam wasn’t until Wednesday, actually, the twenty-sixth, and she and Jessica really planned to study for it on Tuesday, but at her house instead of Jessica’s. She also remembered the date because of what she had seen in the park.

  Josie hadn’t wanted to go into the park at all because if you were born and raised in this city, you knew that Grover Park after dark was like a cage of wild animals, which if you walked into it you could get chewed to bits, or even raped, which she supposed was worse, maybe. But Eddie said this part of the park was safe at night, which was probably true. In this city the neighborhoods changed abruptly. You could walk up Grover Avenue past buildings with awnings and doormen and security guards—like the building Jessica lived in—and then two blocks farther uptown you were all at once in a neighborhood with graffiti all over the buildings and minority groups hanging around in doorways because they were collecting welfare and didn’t want to work. That was what her father told her when he explained why he was voting for Ronald Reagan. ‘Too many spics and niggers getting welfare,’ he’d said. Josie didn’t know about that, but she thought Ronald Reagan was cute.

  So what they did after the movie, they went into the park the way Eddie had suggested. This was around midnight, a little before midnight, and the park entrance they used was a few blocks downtown from Jessica’s building, which meant this was still a safe neighborhood. Also there was a service road to the right of the entrance, and you could always see parks department trucks parked in there, so it had to be pretty safe if the city parked trucks there overnight. Farther uptown, where the police station was, the neighborhood was awful, and if you left your car parked on the street, you’d come back in the morning and find everything gone but the steering wheel. But Eddie promised they wouldn’t be going anywhere near there; he knew some good spots right here near the se
rvice road.

  He really knew a lot of things, Eddie. Well, seventeen, you know.

  He knew, for example, that what you did, you found a spot that was dark but that was also near a light. The marauders in this city, they didn’t like lights. Darkness was very good for marauders. ‘That’s ‘cause all of them are niggers,’ her father said. ‘They blend in nice.’ She didn’t know about that, but she thought Eddie was awfully cute, the way he led the four of them past the service road, where she could see a truck parked at the end of it, and then along the path where the lampposts were spaced maybe fifteen, twenty feet apart, and then sinned climbing up onto a sort of bedrock shelf that had trees around it and was dark, but from which you could still see the path with the lights on

  It was such a nice night.

  Almost like springtime.

  She couldn’t get over it. She kept telling Eddie she couldn’t get over how mild it was for October, almost the end of October.

  She didn’t even know where Jessica and Aaron—that was the other boy’s name—went, they just disappeared in the bushes someplace.

  Eddie spread his jacket on the ground for her.

  It was very dark there on the rock.

  This was now maybe ten after twelve, around then.

  Lying on her back, she could look up through the yellowing leaves of the trees and see millions and millions of stars. Eddie told her all those stars were suns, he was so smart, Eddie. He had his hand inside her sweater when he told her that all those suns up there maybe had planets rotating around them, that maybe they were solar systems like our own, that maybe there were people like us up there, millions of light years away, who were in a park just like this one, that maybe there was a green guy with lizard skin, trying to take off a green girl’s bra, which was what he was trying to do with Josie’s bra. She helped him unclasp it. Boys, even seventeen-year-old boys, could be very smart about a lot of things, but when it came to unhooking a bra they sometimes had trouble.

  He started touching her breasts, and kissing them, and wondering out loud if the green girls up there had only two breasts—he called them ‘breasts,’ which she liked, and not ‘tits’—like the girls here on earth, or did they have four of them or however many—the mind boggled when you began thinking about alien life. He wondered, also, if the green guys up there on a planet millions and millions of light years away had a penis—he called it ‘penis’ and not ‘cock,’ which she also liked—same as the guys on earth, or did they maybe ask a girl to grab hold of their nose or their armpit or maybe one of their horns, if they had horns, maybe they found that thrilling, you know?

  ‘Would you like to grab hold of my penis?’ he asked.

  Well, one thing led to another, you know—he was really very experienced, Eddie—and it must have been around one in the morning when he showed her how to take him in her mouth, which she much preferred to going all the way since she didn’t want to get pregnant and have to have an abortion, which her father said Ronald Reagan would do away with damn soon, you could bet on that, young lady. She had her head in his lap and was doing it the way he told her to do it when she heard the sound of an engine on the service road. She lifted her head to see if it was a parks department truck, but he whispered, ‘No, don’t stop,’ and so she kept doing it, not liking very much that he had his hand on the back of her head and was pushing down on it because, as much as she thought this was better than getting pregnant, she sure as hell didn’t want to choke. He had told her he wouldn’t come in her mouth, but of course he did, and she was trying to decide whether she should swallow it or spit it out when she saw the man on the path.

  He was very tall and very blond.

  He was carrying a naked woman.

  The naked woman was draped over his shoulder, like a sack.

  The naked woman looked very white in the moonlight.

  The man walked right past the rock ledge they were sitting on, five feet below them, no more than that. As he carried the girl under the lamppost, Josie saw blood at the back of the girl’s head where her long blond hair was hanging downward.

  Then the man moved past the lamppost and into the darkness, and all Josie could hear was the sound of leaves crunching under his feet as he disappeared.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she whispered.

  In her excitement she had swallowed instead of spitting.

  “That was terrific,’ Eddie said. ‘Where’d you learn to do that?’ He seemed to have forgotten that he had taught her how to do that.

  ‘Did you see that guy/ Josie said.

  ‘What guy?’ Eddie said.

  ‘That guy with the ... didn’t you see him?’

  ‘No, my eyes were closed,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Holy shit, he had a dead girl over his shoulder!’

  ‘Yeah?’ Eddie said.

  ‘You mean you didn’t see him?’

  ‘I saw stars,’ Eddie said, and grinned.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, and got to her feet, and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and clasped her bra, and pulled down her sweater, and then whispered into the darkness, ‘Jessica?’

  Before they left the park, she forced the others to walk up the service road with her to where a blue Buick was parked behind the parks department truck. She looked at the license plate and read the number on it again and again, repeating it out loud until she’d memorized it. That was when she still thought she might go to the police and tell them what she had seen. That was before she realized that if she went to the police, she would also have to tell them she’d been in the park at one in the morning, doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, which would have been bad enough even without swallowing it.

  That was a month ago.

  She hadn’t seen anything on television about the dead lady in the park.

  Maybe she’d imagined it.

  She did not think she’d imagined it.

  Standing outside the police station now, looking at the green globes with the white numerals 87 on each of them, she thought, My father’ll kill me.

  But the girl in the park was already dead.

  She took a deep breath and climbed the precinct steps.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Carella got to the squadroom forty minutes after Hawes called him. Officially the homicide in the park was his and Brown’s, and Hawes had called them both at home the moment Josie Sears came into the office with her story. She was only fourteen years old, and the law specified that juveniles could not be interviewed or interrogated anywhere in the proximity of adult offenders. Hawes had talked to her initially in Lieutenant Byrnes’s empty office. That was where Carella found them at ten minutes to four that Thanksgiving Day.

  Hawes looked like a sunset against the gunmetal gray of the sky outside. He stood by the meshed window in the lieutenant’s corner office, his red hair streaked with white over the left temple, a purple tie hanging on what appeared to be a lavender shirt with a little polo pony over the left pectoral muscle. He was dressed for his date with Annie Rawles, for which he was already late. He had hoped to be out of here by a quarter to four, at which time the shift was relieved. Genero had shot out of the squadroom like a launch from Canaveral. Hawes was stuck with a fourteen-year-old girl who’d maybe witnessed a man carrying a body on the night of October 24.

  ‘So you got this now?’ he asked Carella.

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘See you,’ Hawes said, and disappeared.

  Carella looked at the young, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl sitting in the chair opposite the lieutenant’s desk. ‘I’m Detective Carella,’ he said. ‘Detective Hawes told me on the phone that you saw something happen in the park last month, I wonder if...’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see anything happen, actually,’ Josie said.

  ‘As I understand it, you saw a man carrying a dead body.’

  ‘Well, I guess she was dead,’ Josie said. She was biting the cuticles on her right hand. Carella squelched a
fatherly urge to tell her to quit doing that.

  ‘Can you tell me what you did see?’ he asked gently.

  ‘This man parked his car on the service road...’

  ‘You saw him parking his car?’

  ‘No, but I heard the car come in, and then the engine went off.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘And then he walked past us on the...’

  She stopped suddenly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We were on this sort of rock. Above the path,’ Josie said.

  ‘Who?’ Carella said. ‘You and who?’