Ed McBain - Long Time No See

They went back that far.

Whoever Jonesy’s partner was, he had done a fine job of compiling individual dossiers not only for members of the Hawks but for every other street-gang member in the precinct. The card on Lloyd Baxter was typical of a “leader’s” card. He had been a truant throughout his elementary, junior high and high school career, finally dropping out the moment he could do so legally, at the age of sixteen, and getting busted six months later for Burglary Three, defined as “knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” The building was, naturally enough, a school. Lloyd Baxter smashed a window and went in there with the alleged intent to steal typewriters. He copped a plea for the lesser charge of Criminal Trespass Three, “knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in or upon premises,” a simple violation for which the punishment was three months and/or a fine of two hundred and fifty dollars — just what a prostitute might have got. He was sentenced to three months in jail, and the sentence was suspended because he was a juvenile. Four months later, immediately after the probationary period ended. Lloyd Baxter was arrested for Assault Three. By that time he was sergeant at arms in the street gang known as the Hawks and the person he assaulted was a kid named Luis Sainz, who was president of a gang called Los Hermanos. Again Lloyd got off with a suspended sentence, probably because his victim was a punk like himself and the judge thought it foolish to pay for the care and feeding of hoodlums who might otherwise do away with each other if left to their own devices on their own turf. The week he beat the assault rap, Lloyd was elected president of the Hawks, a conquering hero returning home to ticker-tape parades and consequent droits du seigneur.

One of die prizes awarded to the newly elected leader was a girl named Roxanne Dumas, who sounded like either a stripper or a great-grandaughter of the late French novelist, neither of which she was. She was, instead, a fifteen-year-old girl whose parents had come from the lovely island of Jamaica, her forebears having been part-English, part-French, her nature amiable and benign until the city got hold of her.

It was some city, this city.

Roxanne was twelve when her parents moved from Jamaica into a section of the city inhabited almost exclusively by legal immigrants or illegal aliens from various Caribbean islands. And even though the mix was predominately Jamaican, the neighborhood had been dubbed Little Cruz Bay by law enforcement officers, later bastardized to Little Cruise Bay when it became a happy hunting ground for teenage prostitutes of island extraction — the white-collar white workers of this city being extremely tolerant when it came to a little café au lait on their lunch hours. Roxanne missed initiation into the oldest profession by a whisper; her parents moved from Little Cruise Bay to Diamond-back when she was thirteen, into a neighborhood where tan was black and black was beautiful whatever the nation of your origin. When Roxanne was fourteen, she began “going” with a boy of sixteen who was a member of the Hawks. She was fifteen when Lloyd Baxter assaulted the president of Los Hermanos to himself become president of the Hawks. Lloyd was seventeen at the time, an impudent age for a president; there were street-gang leaders who were in their late twenties, some of them married and with children of their own. Lloyd and Roxanne hit it off at once. Her former boyfriend, a kid named Henry, merely shined it on without a murmur; he was by then shooting twenty dollars’ worth of heroin a day and was well on his way to a career as a raging junkie. Henry died of an overdose two years later, shortly before the supposed Christmas trauma Jimmy Harris related to Major Lemarre during his stay at Fort Mercer.

There was nothing in the police dossier about Roxanne Dumas having been raped by members of the gang and carried bleeding to a vacant lot. The dossier went much beyond the Christmas twelve years ago, detailing the disposition of each gang member — drafted, busted, hooked, burned or snuffed. But there was nothing about the basement rape; nothing about a bleeding teenage girl being found in a vacant weed-filled lot on a street comer near the clubhouse; nothing about a hospital admitting Roxanne as an emergency patient, wherever she’d been found or wherever she’d dragged herself. Either the beat patrolmen had been derelict, Roxanne had crawled off unnoticed, the records kept by Jonesy’s partner were incomplete — or the incident had never taken place at all.

The records seemed fastidious enough. According to his dossier, Lloyd had resigned as president of the Hawks at the ripe old age of twenty-three, four years after the alleged basement rape. He had been in and out of trouble with the law ever since, but his biggest fall occurred six years ago when he was busted for Robbery One and sentenced to ten at Castleview. He’d served three, and was currently out on parole and working in a car-wash on Landis Avenue. He was now thirty-one years old.

Five years ago, when Lloyd was serving the first year of his sentence at Castleview, Roxanne married a dope pusher named Schoolhouse Hardy. That was his real name. She was twenty-four when she became Mrs. Hardy. She was twenty-eight when Schoolhouse got busted and sent away under the state’s stringent dope laws. Schoolhouse would not be seeing his wife again for a long, long time — except on visiting days. He was now thirty-seven, she was twenty-nine. According to the follow-up on her, she had begun working as a beautician in a place called The Beauty Hut last August, shortly after Schoolhouse was sentenced to twenty-five at Castleview for unlawful possession of eight ounces of cocaine. There was no indication in the records that she had ever again seen Lloyd Baxter from the day he was sent away to the present.

They thanked Detective Richard Jones for his time, and went to look up the long-ago sweethearts at their separate last-known addresses.

834 North Eighty-ninth was a four-story brown-stone with wrought-iron railings flanking the front stoop. They found a mailbox-listing for Lloyd Baxter in apartment 22, rang the bell, and got an answering buzz almost at once. The interior hallway was spotlessly clean; in fact, it smelled of disinfectant. The linoleum on the steps was worn and patched, but- it, too, had been scrubbed to within an inch of its tired life. A gleaming window on the first-floor let in frosty November sunlight. They continued climbing, Meyer puffing audibly and blaming it on his hangover, until they came to the second floor. There were only two doors on the landing, one opposite the other. They knocked on the door to apartment 22, and the door opened instantly.

The black man who looked out at them was perhaps six-feet four inches tall, wearing only belted trousers and looking very much like a magazine ad extolling the merits of weight lifting. Bare-chested and barefooted, broad-shouldered and strikingly handsome, he looked out at the two detectives in clear surprise, eyebrows raising at first and then coming together into a frown.

“Yeah, what is it?” he said, obviously annoyed.

“Police,” Carella said, and showed him the shield. “Are you Lloyd Baxter?”

“I’m Lloyd Baxter. What now?”

“All right for us to come in?”

“What’s the beef? I’m gainfully employed, I go see my P.O. when I’m sposed to, and I ain’t so much as spit on the sidewalk in months.”

“No beef,” Meyer said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“We have some questions.”

“About what?”

“About something that happened twelve years ago.” “I can hardly remember what happened twelve minutes ago.”