Ed McBain - Ghosts

Carella was himself in the shower when he heard the phone ringing. He turned off the water, grabbed a towel, ran out into the bedroom, and caught the phone on the sixth ring. Meyer was on the other end.

“I was in the shower,” Carella told him.

“We have to stop meeting in the shower,” Meyer said. “The fellas are beginning to talk.”

“I was calling about tomorrow.”

“Yeah, what do you think?”

“I’ll have to hit that building today.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Meyer.”

“Listen, you didn’t kill those people,” Meyer said. “How do you like the snow? Is it a white enough Christmas for you? How are you getting downtown?”

“By subway, I guess.”

“Like the poor people,” Meyer said. “Listen, don’t worry about tomorrow, okay? That was our original deal anyway.”

The floor-by-floor, door-to-door canvass of 781 Jackson took Carella and Hawes a bit less time than they’d expected. Carella reached the building at a little after 10:00, a half hour after Hawes had already started on the top floor. They broke for lunch at 1:00, as they’d arranged, and were through for the day at 4:30. They stopped for coffee and crullers at a greasy spoon near the building and went over their notes together. It would later take each of them several hours to type up a collaborative report in quintuplicate from the notes they’d individually made. One copy of the report would go to Lieutenant Byrnes. Another copy would go to Captain Frick, who was in command of the entire precinct. The third copy would go to Homicide, and the remaining two copies would be filed respectively in the Craig and Esposito case folders. Normally, there would have been only four copies, but this was a case with a companion case, and vice versa.

They had, until now, thought of the Esposito murder as the true companion case, despite the cross-indexing that labeled the Craig murder a companion case as well. Now they began to look at things in a somewhat different light. They were both experienced cops, and they knew all about smoke-screen murders. One of Carella’s earliest cases—this was before Hawes had joined the squad, even before Carella and Teddy were married, in fact—had seemed to focus on a cop hater who was running around shooting policemen. But that had been only the smoke screen; the killer had really been after a specific cop and was spreading vapor to mist over the true purpose. Before Hawes’s transfer to the Eight-Seven, he’d investigated a case in which the killer had chopped off the hands of his victim and then killed two other people elsewhere in the city and chopped off their hands as well. He was after insurance money, and he’d chopped off his true quarry’s hands because he didn’t want a fingerprint identification that would have disqualified the claim. The second and third murders were smoke-screen murders, designed to lead the cops into believing they were looking for some kind of freak who went around dismembering his victims.

They would not have thought, until now, that the murder of Gregory Craig was a smoke screen for the murder of Marian Esposito. Everything seemed to indicate that the second murder was a murder of expedience—the killer fleeing from the building with a bloody knife in his hands perhaps, and being seen, and panicking at the possibility of later identification. Zzzzaaaahhhh went the knife, and zing went the strings of my heart. But now they wondered. They wondered because three separate tenants of 781 Jackson told them that Marian and Warren Esposito shared a marriage that could at best be termed rocky.

The couple who lived next door to the Espositos—in Apartment 702, one of the apartments Hawes hit—told him that on two separate occasions Marian had called the police because her husband was beating her up. On each of those occasions the responding patrolmen had settled, on the scene, what is euphemistically known to the police as “a family dispute.” But Marian walked around with a pair of black eyes for weeks after the first beating, and her nose was broken during the second beating.

The tenant in Apartment 508—who recognized Marian from the somewhat unflattering picture the Photo Unit had taken at the scene—told Carella that he’d been riding up in the elevator one time with the Espositos, and they’d started arguing about something, and Warren Esposito had grabbed his wife’s arm and twisted it violently behind her back. “Thought sure he’d break it,” the man said, and then offered Carella a glass of wine, which Carella refused. The man was waiting for his son and daughter-in-law to come visit him for the holiday. His wife had died six months ago; this was to be his first Christmas without her. He again offered Carella a glass of wine. Carella had to refuse; he was a cop on duty. But he lingered longer than the fifteen minutes he’d allotted for each apartment, sensing the old man’s loneliness and hoping to hell his son and daughter-in-law would not disappoint him.

In Apartment 601, just below the Esposito apartment, the woman tenant there told Carella that there was always a lot of yelling and thumping going on upstairs, sometimes at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. She was wrapping Christmas gifts at her kitchen table as she disclosed the information. “Sometimes,” she said, and carefully tied a bow, “if there are children living above you, there’ll be a lot of running around and noise. But the Espositos have no children. And of course, everybody in the building knows he beats her.” She picked up the scissors and gingerly snipped off the end of the ribbon.

“So it looks like we’ve got a wife beater,” Hawes said.

“Looks that way.”

“Came in yesterday wanting to know what we were doing to find his wife’s murderer,” Hawes said, and shook his head. “Had his lawyer call the lieutenant to turn on the screws. He must miss having her to bat around.”

“I want to check this with Records, see if she really did call us twice,” Carella said. “Have you got some change?”

Hawes dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of coins. Carella plucked two dimes from his palm and then went to the phone booth near the cigarette machine. At one of the other tables a blonde in her forties, wearing a sprig of holly on the collar of her coat, turned to Hawes and smiled at him. He smiled back. Carella was on the phone only long enough to get the information he needed. When he got back to the table, he said, “It checks out. First call was on August eighteenth, second one was November twelfth. I’d like to talk to Esposito right now, what do you say?”

“I’m bushed,” Hawes said. “But if he’s our man, I don’t want him spending Christmas in South America.”

They knocked on the door to the Esposito apartment at ten minutes to 5:00. Warren Esposito opened the door for them when he recognized Hawes through the peephole. He was wearing only trousers and a tank-top undershirt. He told them he was dressing to go back to the funeral parlor. He said he’d been there all afternoon and had come home to shower and change his clothes. His eyes were puffy and red; it was evident he’d been crying. Carella remembered Hillary Scott’s description of the “ghost” who’d slain Gregory Craig. Warren Esposito was perhaps thirty-four years old, with curly black hair and dark brown eyes. But how many other people were there in this city with that same combination of hair and eyes, including someone who’d announced himself as Daniel Corbett to the security guard on the day of the murders—and besides, who the hell believed in either mediums or ghosts?

Warren Esposito was no poltergeist. He was perhaps six feet two inches tall, slightly taller than Carella and just as tall as Hawes, with muscles bulging all over his chest, his biceps, and his forearms. The woman Carella had seen lying dead on the sidewalk was perhaps five feet six inches tall, and he guessed she must have weighed 115 pounds. Nice man, Mr. Muscles Esposito, Carella thought, and asked his first question.