Ed McBain - Long Time No See

Did someone find her there?

I don't know. She just disappeared, man.

You never saw her again?

Never.

What happened to Lloyd?

We kicked him off the club and got ourselves a new president.

“So that’s it, huh?” Janet said.

“I guess so.”

“That explains it all, huh?”

“Mm,” Carella said. He sounded very dubious.

“And now you’ve got what you came up here for.”

“I suppose.”

“Does it help you?”

“No.”

“Total loss, huh?” Janet said.

“I guess.”

“So why don’t you take me to dinner?”

Carella looked at her.

“I’m off duty at four,” she said. “You can come back to the apartment with me, and have a drink while I change. Then we can have an early dinner, and... quien sabe? That’s Spanish,” she said, and grinned. “What do you say?”

“I say I’m married.”

“So am I, but my husband’s in Japan at the moment And your wife’s back there in the city, which means we’re here together all by our lonesomes. So what do you say?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You could, you could,” she said, and grinned again. “Just give it a try.”

“Even if I tried.”

“I know a great little restaurant near the hospital, candlelight and wine, violins and gypsy music, romantic as hell. Don’t you yearn for a little romance in your life? Jesus, I yearn for a little romance in mine. Let me go home and put on a red dress and then we’ll...”

“Janet, I can’t.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Janet...”

“No, that’s okay, really.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Come on, really, it’s okay.”

He thought of her on the long drive back to the city.

According to a magazine survey he’d recently read, fifty percent of all American women between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were currently involved in extramarital affairs. That was a whopping huge percentage, considering the fact that back when Kinsey did his survey, the figure was only thirty-eight percent He did not know whether the figure applied by extension to the women of France, Germany and Italy, belonging as they all did to the Common Market, but he suspected in his heart of Dickensian hearts that it certainly did not apply to the ladies of the British Empire — never, no never. In any event, and on any given day of the week, one out of two American women either were on their way to some gentleman’s bed or else had just come from some gentleman’s bed, the fellow in question not being related by marriage to the peripatetic lady. If one could reasonably assume, in the absence of any supportive slick-magazine evidence, that fifty percent of all men between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were similarly occupied, then fifty percent of the whole damn country was fooling around with somebody who wasn’t his wife or her husband or vice versa as the case might be.

The thought was staggering.

What made it even more staggering was the fact that a percentage-woman who was fooling around had chanced upon a percentage-man who wasn't fooling around. Such odds, Carella surmised, were insurmountable — so to speak. But there they’d been, Sergeant Janet Somebody and Detective Steve Carella, in a room that reminded him of a monastery cell, heads bent as if in prayer, knees touching, and damned if he hadn’t behaved like a man who’d sworn vows of celibacy and near-silence. “Sorry, Janet,” mumbled, mumble, “Really awfully sorry,” mumble, finger the beads, say the vespers, drive back to the city wondering what had been missed beneath that olive-drab skirt, wondering what her lips, her breasts—

Cut it out, Carella thought.

He turned his mind instead to Lemarre’s report, and found the doctor’s conclusions as frustrating as had been the brief encounter with Janet. As a working cop, Carella would have felt compelled to examine more closely the criminal aspects of Jimmy’s traumatic memory, but perhaps psychiatrists didn’t work that way, perhaps they were only mildly curious about a bleeding rape victim dropped in an empty lot—

Did someone find her there?

I don't know. She just disappear, man.

You never saw her again?

Never.

And that had been that, except for the incidental information that Lloyd had later been replaced by a new president. The basement rape would have happened twelve years ago, when Jimmy was eighteen. Simple enough to check with Sophie Harris to learn where they were living at the time, then check with the precinct, whichever precinct it was, for whatever they had on a street gang named the Hawks, a deposed president named Lloyd, and a rape victim named Roxanne. He’d do that when he got back to the city. Yes, he’d have to do that. Maybe Lemarre had cared only about getting to the root of the nightmares — if indeed he’d done that — but Carella was interested in knowing whether the perpetrators of a Class B Felony had ever been apprehended.

He kept his foot on the accelerator, maintaining a steady sixty miles an hour, the limit on the Thruway. At a quarter to five he was still forty miles from the city, and it was beginning to get dark.

The woman who tapped her way along the sidewalk had lived in a world of darkness from the moment she was born. She was sixty-three years old, and lived alone in a building just off Delaware. Two dozen porn movie theaters and as many massage parlors were crowded into the square half-mile that defined her neighborhood. The flesh castles were storefront operations, sidewalk plate-glass windows painted out black or bilious green, hand-lettered signs advertising complete satisfaction at ten bucks a throw, No Rip-Offs. The skin-flick houses showed movies that never made it to the posher dream palaces on the city’s South Side, where ladies shopping for the afternoon stopped to rest their weary feet and simultaneously tickle their fancies with films artfully photographed and calculated to arouse.

The woman wore an accordion around her neck. She made her living playing the accordion. She did not think of herself as a beggar, and perhaps she wasn’t. She was a blind musician. She played on street comers, played tunes by ear on the instrument that had belonged to her father before his death. He had died forty years ago, when she was twenty-three. She had begun taking care of herself then, and was proud of the fact that she was able to manage. She did not know that the neighborhood in which she lived had become a cesspool over the past four years.

Each morning she said hello in passing to the tailor on the comer of Delaware and Pierce, and he returned her greeting while two doors down men entered a place called Heavenly Bodies, and across the street a theater marquee advertised a movie titled Upside Down Cake. She knew that drunks sprawled in doorways on the route from her building to the subway, but this was the city and drunks were expected, drunks had always been there. She did most of her shopping at the big supermarket four blocks from the apartment, and did not know that it was flanked by a pair of massage parlors respectively if not respectfully called The Joint and The Body Shop. Once a hawker for one of the rubdown emporiums handed her a leaflet upon which was depicted a flash of naked young ladies and a pate of bald-headed men enjoying communal saunas and whirlpools and whatnots. The leaflet was wasted on the woman with the accordion. Her sightless world was serene; she truly saw no evil. But behind her, as she threw the leaflet away, she heard laughter dark and mysterious.

Moving along the sidewalk now, her long white cane extended and undulating as though blown by a gentle breeze, right to left, back again, touching the sidewalk, touching the air, she turned the corner onto Pierce and began walking toward her building in the middle of the block. The tailor shop was closed; it closed at six and it was now seven-thirty. She ran her cane along the wrought-iron railing that defined the basement area of the brownstone north of the tailor shop, here now came the open space where the steps led down to where the garbage cans were stacked, she could smell them on the cold November air, there the post on the other side of the steps, and now the front stoop of the building, and the railing on the other side, abruptly turning back in a right angle toward the brick face of the big apartment building two doors down from her own building.