Ed McBain - Long Time No See

“Do you know where we can reach these other men?”

“I’ve got Tanner’s address. Fiersen said to just write him care of American Express in Amsterdam.”

“You exchanged addresses?”

“Yeah, we all did.”

“Jimmy, too?”

“Jimmy, too.”

“You gave him your address?”

“We all gave each other our addresses.”

“Did Jimmy write to you?”

“No.”

“Would you know if he wrote to any of the other men?”

“How would I know?”

“Was Lieutenant Tataglia at the reunion?”

“No. We were surprised about that because he was stationed at Fort Lee in Virginia, and that’s not such a long haul to New Jersey. Tanner came all the way from California.”

“How’d you know where he was stationed?”

“Tataglia? Well, there was a captain there at the reunion, he used to be in command of the 1st Platoon, some of the guys got talking to him. He told us Tataglia was a major now, and stationed at Fort Lee.”

“Who’d he tell?”

“I forget who was standing around there. I think it was me and Jimmy and another guy from the squad, but not from Alpha.”

“Who would that have been?”

“A guy from Bravo. There wasn’t much left of Bravo. Two of them were killed in action the day Jimmy got wounded, and another guy was killed just after Christmas.”

“The one who was at the reunion — do you know his name?”

“Of course I know his name. Danny Cortez, he lives in Philadelphia.”

“Have you got his address, too?”

“Yeah, I took it down.”

“Did Jimmy get his address?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t follow Jimmy around seeing whose address he took or whose address he didn’t.” “But you know for sure that Jimmy took the addresses of the men who were in Alpha.”

“Yeah, because we were all standing around bullshitting, and we used the same pencil to write the addresses.”

“What were you bullshitting about?”

“I told you. Old times. We went through a lot together over there.”

“What did you go through?”

“A lot of action. In the boonies and in the whorehouses, too.”

“What do you mean by boonies?”

“The boondocks. You know, out in the jungles there. The boonies.”

“What kind of action did you see?”

“Vill sweeps mostly. We’d surround a village in the night, and then attack at first light, before they left their women and their rice bowls to go off in the jungle again. We’d destroy whatever we found — AT mines, sugar, pickled fish, small-arms rounds, whatever the fuck.”

“Were you on a vill sweep when Jimmy got wounded?

“No, that was Ala Moana. That was a big operation. That was the whole battalion.”

“How bad was it?”

“It wasn’t good. We lost a lot more people over there than the newspapers made out. All the body counts were the enemy , you dig? Nobody bothered to count us.”

“Did Jimmy get along with everybody in Alpha?”

“Yeah.”

“Everybody in the squad?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you think of anybody who might have wanted him dead?”

“Nope.”

“And that’s the last time you saw him, right? In August.”

“That’s the last time I saw him.”

“You want to let me have those addresses now?” Hawes said.

The telephone again.

The telephone was as vital a tool to policemen as was a tension bar to a burglar. They now had addresses for Rudy Tanner and a man named Danny Cortez, who’d been in Bravo Fire Team of the 2nd Squad. They also knew that Karl Fiersen could be reached care of American Express in Amsterdam, but that didn’t help them much because the city would never spring for a transatlantic call even if by some miracle they could get a phone number for Fiersen. They dialed Directory Assistance for Los Angeles and for Philadelphia, and came up with listings for both Tanner and Cortez. Carella talked to Tanner first He asked almost the same questions about the action that December day, and got almost the same answers. Nothing that didn’t jibe. He kept reaching.

“When did you see him last?”

“August At the reunion.”

“Did he mention any plans to you?”

“Plans? What do you mean?”

“Plans for himself and somebody in Alpha.”

“In Alpha? I don’t get you.”

“He didn’t ask for your help in some plan he had?”

“No. No, he didn’t.”

“Did he write to you after the reunion?”

“No.”

“But you gave him your address, isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“And he gave you his address, right?”

“Yes.”

“When’s the last time you were here in this city?”

“August. On the way to the reunion.”

“Haven’t been back since?”

“No.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Hang up the phone, look at your notes, compare what you just got from Tanner with what you already have from Tataglia and Hopewell and Poole. Think about it Wonder about it. Wonder especially about Jimmy’s nightmares, which his doctor said were rooted in a basement rape that never took place. Make a note to call the police psychiatrist — what the hell was his name? Consider the possibility that the murders were motiveless.

There used to be a time when most murders started as family quarrels resolved with a hatchet or a gun. Find a lady dead on the bathroom floor, go look for her husband. Find a man with both legs broken and a knife in his heart besides, go look for his girl friend’s husband, and try to get there fast before the husband threw her off the roof in the bargain. Those were the good old days. Hardly ever would you get a murder where everything had been figured out in advance — woman wanted to get rid of her husband, she worked out a complicated plot involving poison extracted from the glands of a green South American snake, started lacing his cognac with it every night, poor man went into convulsions and died six months later while the woman was on the Riviera living it up with a gigolo from Copenhagen. Nothing like that. In the good old days your average real-life murder was a woman coming into the apartment and finding her husband drunk again, and shaking him, and then saying the hell with it, and going out to the kitchen for an ice pick and sticking him sixteen times in the chest and the throat. That was real life, baby. You wanted bullshit, you went to mystery novels written by ladies who lived in Sussex. Thrillers. About as thrilling as Aunt Lucy’s tatted nightcap.

In the good old days you wrapped a thing up in three, four hours sometimes — between lunch and cocktails, so to speak. And usually it wasn’t the butler who did it, nor even the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet, but instead your own brother or your brother’s wife or your Uncle Tim from Nome, Alaska. Nowadays it was different. One-third of all the homicides committed in this city involved a victim and a murderer who didn’t even know each other when the crime was committed. Perfect strangers, total and utter, locked in the ultimate intimate obscenity for the mere seconds it took to squeeze a trigger or plunge a blade. So why not believe that Jimmy and Isabel and Hester were victims of someone totally unknown to any of them, some bedbug who had a hang-up about blind people? Why not? Knew them only from their respective neighborhoods, saw them around all the time, shuffling along, their very presence disgusted him. Decided to do away with them. Why not?

Maybe.

Carella sighed, dialed the area code 215 for Philadelphia, and then dialed Danny Cortez’s number. It was almost 5:30 on the squadroom clock, he hoped the man would be home from work already. The phone rang three times, and then a woman picked up.

“Hello?” she said. In that single word he thought he detected a Spanish accent, but that may have been because he knew Danny’s surname was Cortez.