Calypso (87th Precinct), page 5
“A blow job? Is that what you’re interested in?”
“I might be.”
“What’s holdin’ you back then?”
“The price. Forty sounds definitely high.”
“Forty’s what I’m gettin’.”
“You’re not getting much standing here in the rain,” he said, and laughed at his own little joke. “Three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “You’re not getting much standing in the rain.”
“You ain’t gettin’ nothin’ ’thout the forty dollars,” she said and laughed with him. “Think it over. Take your time.”
“That’s a nice…ah…set you’ve got there,” he said.
“Mmm,” she said, smiling.
“Very nice,” he said, and reached out to touch her breasts.
She turned away shyly. “No, please,” she said. “Not here.”
“Where?”
“Place around the corner.”
“Forty dollars, is that it?”
“Forty’s the price.”
“Are you very good at it?”
“I’m not Linda Lovelace, but I promise you won’t be sorry.”
“And you’re clean? You’ve been to a doctor?”
“Get a checkup every day,” she lied.
“Still,” he said, shaking his head. “Forty dollars.”
She said nothing. He was already hooked.
“Well, okay,” he said, “I guess so.”
She looped her hand through his arm, and stepped under the umbrella with him.
Sister woman, black woman, why she do this way? On her back, on her knees, for the white man pay? She a slave, sister woman, she a slave this way,
On her knees, on her back, for the white man pay.
On her knees, sister woman, is the time to pray,
Never mind what the white man he got to say.
Let the white girl do…
“This is my first time with a colored girl,” the man said.
“Always a first time,” she said. “Change your luck. You want to let me have the forty, please?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “of course,” and took his wallet from his rear pocket, and pulled out a sheaf of bills. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“C.J.,” she said. She waited while he searched for the $40. She once had a John ask her if she could break a C-note. Surprised hell out of him when she dug the change out of her bag. Thought he was going to get a free ride, the jerk. Can you break a hundred? Sure, honey, how you want it? Twenties or tens? This same room right here. Sometimes they let her use a room in one of the massage parlors, when things weren’t busy with the regular girls. Go in there, mirrors on the walls, bottles of oil all different colors on the floor, think you were in an Arabian whorehouse someplace. This room here at the hotel was costing her $5 for however long it’d take her to blow this dude and send him on his way. Double bed and a dresser, sink in the corner, easy chair over by the window, shade on it, no curtains. Five bucks for a half hour at most. She was in the wrong business, she should be a hotel owner someplace.
“You gettin’ that forty?” she said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Do you mind singles?”
“Singles? Forty dollars in singles?”
“I’m a waiter,” he said, as if that explained it.
“I’m gettin’ to be a waiter, too,” she said, “waitin’ for the forty.”
He looked at her again, and then laughed and said, “Sorry,” and began counting out the $40 for her, one bill at a time, onto the palm of her outstretched hand. She listened to him counting it out, thinking the damn fool would spend all night paying her, never would get down to business here.
“…thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty,” he said triumphantly. “I hope this’ll be good.”
“It’ll be real fine,” she said. “Don’t you worry. You want to go wash yourself now?”
“Wash myself?”
“Mm, wash your little ole dick, honey. Way I stay clean is to make sure you’re clean.”
“Yes, good,” he said. “Very good. Yes.”
“This your first time with a hooker?” she asked.
“No, no.”
“I’ll bet it’s your first time,” she said, smiling.
“No, I’ve been around,” he said, and went to the sink in the corner.
“But you never been asked to wash yourself before, huh?”
“Oh, sure I have,” he said.
“Wash it good now,” she said, and climbed onto the bed. She was wearing no panties. She opened her legs wide, figuring she’d give him a shot of the beaver when he turned around, maybe talk him into a fuck at $60. Blow jobs were quicker, though. All percentage, she guessed. Come on, you asshole, she thought. I said wash it, not sterilize it. He turned from the sink, saw her lying there with her legs wide open, and damn if he didn’t blush!
“Come on over here,” she said, smiling.
He had a little white dick, was drying it with one of the hand towels as he came toward the bed. He was still blushing, little bald honky in his fifties, blinking at her behind his glasses, blushing red all the way from under his chin to the top of his baldy bean head.
“Think you might want some of this sweet pussy instead?” she asked, raising her hips. “Cost you only twenty more.”
“No, no, that’s all right,” he said.
“Mighty sweet pussy,” she said.
“No, no, thank you.”
“Just the blow job, huh?”
“Yes, please.”
“Just C.J.’s tender lips, huh?”
“Yes, please, just that.”
“Well, fine then,” she said. “Get up here on the bed. What’s your name, honey?”
“Frank,” he said.
Frank, she thought. Shit, your name is Marvin or Ralph. I get more fuckin’ Franks, she thought.
“Will you…ah…take off your clothes?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, “if that’s how you want it.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“You’re the boss,” she said.
She stripped silently. He watched her while she undressed. Wearing only the blond wig and the high-heeled patent-leather shoes—always turned them on, you wore your spikes to bed—she went back to him.
“Ready, Frank?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” he said.
Her mouth descended.
Sister woman, black woman, on her knees give head
To a man like he like to see her dead.
Can’t she see, don’t she see, can’t she read in his head?
She a slave to his will, and the man want her dead.
She a nigger for sure, she a slave still in chains,
And the white man’ll whip her…
It was still raining when they came out onto the street together. Frank, or whatever his name was, thanked her for her services, and told her he’d look for her again sometime. She said, “Right, Frank, glad you enjoyed it.” They parted company on the corner outside the hotel. With the umbrella over his head, he walked off into the rain. She pulled the collar of her coat high on the back of her neck, ducked her head against the rain, and began walking up toward the railroad station again. It was almost 3:30. Turn a few more tricks, call it a night. Fuck Joey. Had no heart that man, sending a whore out on a night like this. Well, it wasn’t gonna be for much longer. Warned him, told him you keep treatin’ me mean like this, I’m splittin’ for good, you just wait and see. He told her, “You split on me, baby, I’ll split your head. They’ll find you in the gutter with your skull in two halves, you split on me.” Sure, Joey, she thought, but you just wait and see. I got me $2,600 in the bank now, money you don’t know nothin’ about, man, got it all in a savings account uptown, Clara Jean Hawkins, far from the scene, man, don’t want you seein’ me make no deposit. $2,600 so far, and more comin’. $200 every Wednesday night. And tomorrow I’ll be talkin’ to the man again, I’ll be sittin’ down at lunch with him and we’re gonna be talkin’ bout that album again. I’m gonna tell him I’ll have the three thou by the end of the month, which is more’n enough to get it done, he tole me, and then you know what you can do, don’t you, Joey? You can take your warnin’s and your threats, and you can shove them right up your—
There were footsteps behind her.
Light, clicking through the rain.
She turned, thinking it might be a John making an approach. She squinted through the rain, could make out only somebody tall and thin, dressed all in black. She pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.
“Want a date?” she asked.
The shots thundered into the night, four of them in succession. The first bullet missed her, but the second one entered her body just below the left breast and killed her instantly. The third shot ripped into her larynx and the fourth, as she staggered backward dead, entered her face just to the right of her nose, and blew out an exit wound the size of a half-dollar at the back of her head. Her wig fell off as she collapsed to the pavement. It lay on the sidewalk beside her open skull, the rain drilling its synthetic blond fibers, the rain pocking the spreading puddle of thick red blood.
Sister woman, black woman, won’t she hear my song?
What she doin this way surely got to be wrong.
Lift her head, raise her eyes, sing the words out strong,
Sister woman, black woman…
Carella hated mysteries.
In mysteries, there were never funerals or wakes. In mysteries, the victim got shot or stabbed or strangled or clubbed to death, and then was conveniently forgotten. In mysteries, a corpse was only a device to set an investigative pot boiling. In real life, the murder victim was a person, and this person usually had relatives or friends who arranged for a wake and a decent burial. The dead man, in keeping with tribal custom everywhere, was accorded the same respect and dignity he would have earned had he died peacefully in his sleep. He had once been a person, you see, and you do not sweep people under the rug just so a private eye can keep things moving along at a brisk clip.
The wake for George Chadderton was held in the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback. Further uptown, near Pettit Lane, a similar wake was being held for a young black hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins who’d been murdered the night before in Midtown South, while Carella was poring over Chadderton’s notebook. Carella did not know about the second murder. This was a very big city, and the Midtown South precinct was a good three miles from the Eight-Seven. The man who’d caught the squeal on the Hawkins murder was named Alex Leopold, a detective/third who’d been transferred from a Calm’s Point precinct three months earlier. He did not know Carella and had never worked with him. The two Homicide cops who’d put in their obligatory appearance at the scene of the second murder were not Monoghan and Monroe, who’d gone home to bed after leaving the scene of the Chadderton murder, but were instead a similar pair of dicks named Forbes and Phelps. Mandatory autopsies had been performed on both the Chadderton and Hawkins corpses, and recovered bullets had already been sent to the Ballistics Section. But two different men at Ballistics were working the two different cases, at microscopes not six feet from each other, and they had instructions only to report their findings to the two separate detectives working the two cases in different sections of Isola. There had been no witnesses to the second murder—no citizen eager to step forward and say that Clara Jean Hawkins had been slain by a tall, slender man or woman dressed entirely in black. At ten minutes to 12:00 that Saturday morning, September 16, as Carella approached the doors of the funeral home, neither he nor anyone else in the Police Department had the faintest notion that the murders might have been linked.
It was still raining. He was wearing a soggy trench coat and a soggier rain hat, and feeling very much the way he looked after only six hours of sleep on a cot in the precinct locker room. Chadderton’s notebook was in a sodden manila Police Department evidence envelope he carried under his arm. He had studied it till close to 5:00 A.M., and had found nothing in the lyrics that would point a finger at a possible murderer. From Chadderton’s appointment calendar, he had made a list of names he wanted to ask Chloe about. He intended to do that when he returned both books to her—with apologies for his behavior the night before. A call to the Medical Examiner’s Office this morning had informed Carella that Chadderton’s body had been picked up at the hospital at 8:00 A.M. for transfer to the funeral home on St. Sab’s. Presumably the body had by now been drained of its blood and the contents of its stomach, intestines, and bladder. Presumably, the mortician had already injected by trocar or tube a solution of formaldehyde that would cause coagulation of the body’s proteins. Presumably, the mortician had worked with wax and cosmetics to repair Chadderton’s shattered left cheekbone and disguise the gaping holes in his neck and the top of his skull. Carella wondered whether there would be an open coffin. Mourners usually chose to see their departed loved ones as sleeping peacefully; either that, or they chose not to view them at all.
The funeral director was a short, very dark black man who told Carella that the body would be ready for viewing at 2:00 P.M., in the Blue Chapel. He further informed Carella that Mrs. Chadderton had been there earlier today, to receive the body and to make all the arrangements, and had left at approximately 11:00 A.M. She had mentioned that she would not be back until 5:00. Carella thanked the man, and stepped outside into the pouring rain again. He went back in a moment later, and asked if he might use the telephone. The man showed him into an office opposite the Pink Chapel. In the Isola directory, Carella found a listing for George C. Chadderton at 1137 Raucher Street. He dialed the number and let it ring twelve times. There was no answer. He could not imagine that Chloe Chadderton had gone to work on the day following her husband’s murder, but he looked up the number of the Club Flamingo, dialed it, and spoke to a woman who identified herself as one of the bartenders. She told him that Chloe was expected at 12:00 noon. He thanked her, hung up, jotted the club’s address into his notebook, and then went outside to where he’d parked his car. He had forgotten to close the window on the driver’s side, which he’d partially opened earlier to keep the windshield from fogging. The seat was soaking wet when he climbed inside. Both plate-glass windows of the Club Flamingo were painted over pink. In the center of the window on the left was a huge hand-lettered sign advertising topless, bottomless, noon to 4:00 A.M. The club apparently offered more by way of spectacle than Chloe had revealed to him last night. “It’s a topless club,” she’d said, the difference between topless and bottomless being somewhat akin to that between Manslaughter and Murder One. In the other window was an equally large sign promising generous drinks, free lunch. Carella was hungry—he’d had only a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee for breakfast. He opened one of the two entrance doors and stepped into the club’s dim interior. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, he stood just inside the entrance doors, listening to the canned rock music that blared from speakers all around the room. Dead ahead was a long oval bar. Two girls, one on either side of the bar, were gyrating in time to the rock music. Both girls were wearing sequined, high-heeled, ankle-strapped pumps and fringed G-strings. Both girls were bare-breasted. Neither of them wore anything under the G-strings. Neither of them was Chloe Chadderton.
He noticed now that there were small tables around the perimeter of the room. The place was not very crowded. He suspected the rain was keeping customers away. But at one of the tables, a blond girl danced—if one could call it that—for the exclusive pleasure of a man who sat there alone, nursing a beer. There were four men sitting at the bar, two on each side of it, three of them white, one of them black. Carella took a seat midway down the bar. One of the bartenders—a young redheaded girl wearing a black leotard and black net stockings—walked to where he was sitting, her high-heeled pumps clicking on the hard wooden floor.
“Something to drink, sir?” she said.
“Have you got anything soft?” Carella asked.
“Oh, yes indeed,” she said, and rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, at once imparting sexual innuendo to his innocuous question. He looked at her. She figured she’d somehow made a mistake and immediately said, “Pepsi, Coke, Seven-Up, or ginger ale. It’ll cost you same as the whiskey, though.”
“How much is that?”
“Three-fifty. But that includes the lunch bar.”
“Coke or Pepsi, either one’s fine,” Carella said. “Has Chloe Chadderton come in yet?”
“She’s taking her break just now,” the redhead said, and then casually asked, “You a cop?”
“Yes,” Carella said, “I’m a cop.”
“Figures. Guy comes in here wanting an ice-cream soda, he’s got to be a cop on duty. What do you want with Chloe?”
“That’s between her and me, isn’t it?”
“This is a clean place, mister.”
“Nobody said it wasn’t.”
“Chloe dances same as the other girls. You won’t see nothing here you can’t see in any one of the legitimate theaters downtown. They got big stage shows downtown with nude dancers in them, same as here.”
“Mm-huh,” Carella said.
The redhead turned away, uncapped his soft drink, and poured it into a glass. “Nobody is allowed to touch the girls here. They just dance, period. Same as downtown. If it isn’t against the law in a legitimate theater, then it isn’t against the law here, either.”
“Relax,” Carella said. “I’m not looking for a bust.”
The girl rolled her eyes again. For a moment, he didn’t quite understand her reaction. And then he realized she was deliberately equating the police expression for “arrest”—a term he was certain she’d heard a hundred times before—with what was bursting exuberantly in the black leotard top. He looked at her again. She shrugged elaborately, turned away, and walked to the cash register at the end of the bar. One of the dancers was squatting before the solitary black customer now, her legs widespread, tossing aside the fringe of the G-string to reveal herself completely. The man stared at her exposed genitals. The girl smiled at him. She licked her lips. The man was wearing eyeglasses. The girl took the glasses from his eyes, and wiped them slowly over her opening, a mock expression of shocked propriety on her face. She returned the glasses to the man’s head, and then arched herself over backward, supporting herself with her arms, thrusting her open crotch toward his face, and pumping at him while he continued staring. Just like the legitimate theaters downtown, Carella thought.
“I might be.”
“What’s holdin’ you back then?”
“The price. Forty sounds definitely high.”
“Forty’s what I’m gettin’.”
“You’re not getting much standing here in the rain,” he said, and laughed at his own little joke. “Three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “You’re not getting much standing in the rain.”
“You ain’t gettin’ nothin’ ’thout the forty dollars,” she said and laughed with him. “Think it over. Take your time.”
“That’s a nice…ah…set you’ve got there,” he said.
“Mmm,” she said, smiling.
“Very nice,” he said, and reached out to touch her breasts.
She turned away shyly. “No, please,” she said. “Not here.”
“Where?”
“Place around the corner.”
“Forty dollars, is that it?”
“Forty’s the price.”
“Are you very good at it?”
“I’m not Linda Lovelace, but I promise you won’t be sorry.”
“And you’re clean? You’ve been to a doctor?”
“Get a checkup every day,” she lied.
“Still,” he said, shaking his head. “Forty dollars.”
She said nothing. He was already hooked.
“Well, okay,” he said, “I guess so.”
She looped her hand through his arm, and stepped under the umbrella with him.
Sister woman, black woman, why she do this way? On her back, on her knees, for the white man pay? She a slave, sister woman, she a slave this way,
On her knees, on her back, for the white man pay.
On her knees, sister woman, is the time to pray,
Never mind what the white man he got to say.
Let the white girl do…
“This is my first time with a colored girl,” the man said.
“Always a first time,” she said. “Change your luck. You want to let me have the forty, please?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “of course,” and took his wallet from his rear pocket, and pulled out a sheaf of bills. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“C.J.,” she said. She waited while he searched for the $40. She once had a John ask her if she could break a C-note. Surprised hell out of him when she dug the change out of her bag. Thought he was going to get a free ride, the jerk. Can you break a hundred? Sure, honey, how you want it? Twenties or tens? This same room right here. Sometimes they let her use a room in one of the massage parlors, when things weren’t busy with the regular girls. Go in there, mirrors on the walls, bottles of oil all different colors on the floor, think you were in an Arabian whorehouse someplace. This room here at the hotel was costing her $5 for however long it’d take her to blow this dude and send him on his way. Double bed and a dresser, sink in the corner, easy chair over by the window, shade on it, no curtains. Five bucks for a half hour at most. She was in the wrong business, she should be a hotel owner someplace.
“You gettin’ that forty?” she said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Do you mind singles?”
“Singles? Forty dollars in singles?”
“I’m a waiter,” he said, as if that explained it.
“I’m gettin’ to be a waiter, too,” she said, “waitin’ for the forty.”
He looked at her again, and then laughed and said, “Sorry,” and began counting out the $40 for her, one bill at a time, onto the palm of her outstretched hand. She listened to him counting it out, thinking the damn fool would spend all night paying her, never would get down to business here.
“…thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty,” he said triumphantly. “I hope this’ll be good.”
“It’ll be real fine,” she said. “Don’t you worry. You want to go wash yourself now?”
“Wash myself?”
“Mm, wash your little ole dick, honey. Way I stay clean is to make sure you’re clean.”
“Yes, good,” he said. “Very good. Yes.”
“This your first time with a hooker?” she asked.
“No, no.”
“I’ll bet it’s your first time,” she said, smiling.
“No, I’ve been around,” he said, and went to the sink in the corner.
“But you never been asked to wash yourself before, huh?”
“Oh, sure I have,” he said.
“Wash it good now,” she said, and climbed onto the bed. She was wearing no panties. She opened her legs wide, figuring she’d give him a shot of the beaver when he turned around, maybe talk him into a fuck at $60. Blow jobs were quicker, though. All percentage, she guessed. Come on, you asshole, she thought. I said wash it, not sterilize it. He turned from the sink, saw her lying there with her legs wide open, and damn if he didn’t blush!
“Come on over here,” she said, smiling.
He had a little white dick, was drying it with one of the hand towels as he came toward the bed. He was still blushing, little bald honky in his fifties, blinking at her behind his glasses, blushing red all the way from under his chin to the top of his baldy bean head.
“Think you might want some of this sweet pussy instead?” she asked, raising her hips. “Cost you only twenty more.”
“No, no, that’s all right,” he said.
“Mighty sweet pussy,” she said.
“No, no, thank you.”
“Just the blow job, huh?”
“Yes, please.”
“Just C.J.’s tender lips, huh?”
“Yes, please, just that.”
“Well, fine then,” she said. “Get up here on the bed. What’s your name, honey?”
“Frank,” he said.
Frank, she thought. Shit, your name is Marvin or Ralph. I get more fuckin’ Franks, she thought.
“Will you…ah…take off your clothes?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, “if that’s how you want it.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“You’re the boss,” she said.
She stripped silently. He watched her while she undressed. Wearing only the blond wig and the high-heeled patent-leather shoes—always turned them on, you wore your spikes to bed—she went back to him.
“Ready, Frank?” she asked.
“Yes, please,” he said.
Her mouth descended.
Sister woman, black woman, on her knees give head
To a man like he like to see her dead.
Can’t she see, don’t she see, can’t she read in his head?
She a slave to his will, and the man want her dead.
She a nigger for sure, she a slave still in chains,
And the white man’ll whip her…
It was still raining when they came out onto the street together. Frank, or whatever his name was, thanked her for her services, and told her he’d look for her again sometime. She said, “Right, Frank, glad you enjoyed it.” They parted company on the corner outside the hotel. With the umbrella over his head, he walked off into the rain. She pulled the collar of her coat high on the back of her neck, ducked her head against the rain, and began walking up toward the railroad station again. It was almost 3:30. Turn a few more tricks, call it a night. Fuck Joey. Had no heart that man, sending a whore out on a night like this. Well, it wasn’t gonna be for much longer. Warned him, told him you keep treatin’ me mean like this, I’m splittin’ for good, you just wait and see. He told her, “You split on me, baby, I’ll split your head. They’ll find you in the gutter with your skull in two halves, you split on me.” Sure, Joey, she thought, but you just wait and see. I got me $2,600 in the bank now, money you don’t know nothin’ about, man, got it all in a savings account uptown, Clara Jean Hawkins, far from the scene, man, don’t want you seein’ me make no deposit. $2,600 so far, and more comin’. $200 every Wednesday night. And tomorrow I’ll be talkin’ to the man again, I’ll be sittin’ down at lunch with him and we’re gonna be talkin’ bout that album again. I’m gonna tell him I’ll have the three thou by the end of the month, which is more’n enough to get it done, he tole me, and then you know what you can do, don’t you, Joey? You can take your warnin’s and your threats, and you can shove them right up your—
There were footsteps behind her.
Light, clicking through the rain.
She turned, thinking it might be a John making an approach. She squinted through the rain, could make out only somebody tall and thin, dressed all in black. She pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.
“Want a date?” she asked.
The shots thundered into the night, four of them in succession. The first bullet missed her, but the second one entered her body just below the left breast and killed her instantly. The third shot ripped into her larynx and the fourth, as she staggered backward dead, entered her face just to the right of her nose, and blew out an exit wound the size of a half-dollar at the back of her head. Her wig fell off as she collapsed to the pavement. It lay on the sidewalk beside her open skull, the rain drilling its synthetic blond fibers, the rain pocking the spreading puddle of thick red blood.
Sister woman, black woman, won’t she hear my song?
What she doin this way surely got to be wrong.
Lift her head, raise her eyes, sing the words out strong,
Sister woman, black woman…
Carella hated mysteries.
In mysteries, there were never funerals or wakes. In mysteries, the victim got shot or stabbed or strangled or clubbed to death, and then was conveniently forgotten. In mysteries, a corpse was only a device to set an investigative pot boiling. In real life, the murder victim was a person, and this person usually had relatives or friends who arranged for a wake and a decent burial. The dead man, in keeping with tribal custom everywhere, was accorded the same respect and dignity he would have earned had he died peacefully in his sleep. He had once been a person, you see, and you do not sweep people under the rug just so a private eye can keep things moving along at a brisk clip.
The wake for George Chadderton was held in the Monroe Funeral Home on St. Sebastian Avenue in Diamondback. Further uptown, near Pettit Lane, a similar wake was being held for a young black hooker named Clara Jean Hawkins who’d been murdered the night before in Midtown South, while Carella was poring over Chadderton’s notebook. Carella did not know about the second murder. This was a very big city, and the Midtown South precinct was a good three miles from the Eight-Seven. The man who’d caught the squeal on the Hawkins murder was named Alex Leopold, a detective/third who’d been transferred from a Calm’s Point precinct three months earlier. He did not know Carella and had never worked with him. The two Homicide cops who’d put in their obligatory appearance at the scene of the second murder were not Monoghan and Monroe, who’d gone home to bed after leaving the scene of the Chadderton murder, but were instead a similar pair of dicks named Forbes and Phelps. Mandatory autopsies had been performed on both the Chadderton and Hawkins corpses, and recovered bullets had already been sent to the Ballistics Section. But two different men at Ballistics were working the two different cases, at microscopes not six feet from each other, and they had instructions only to report their findings to the two separate detectives working the two cases in different sections of Isola. There had been no witnesses to the second murder—no citizen eager to step forward and say that Clara Jean Hawkins had been slain by a tall, slender man or woman dressed entirely in black. At ten minutes to 12:00 that Saturday morning, September 16, as Carella approached the doors of the funeral home, neither he nor anyone else in the Police Department had the faintest notion that the murders might have been linked.
It was still raining. He was wearing a soggy trench coat and a soggier rain hat, and feeling very much the way he looked after only six hours of sleep on a cot in the precinct locker room. Chadderton’s notebook was in a sodden manila Police Department evidence envelope he carried under his arm. He had studied it till close to 5:00 A.M., and had found nothing in the lyrics that would point a finger at a possible murderer. From Chadderton’s appointment calendar, he had made a list of names he wanted to ask Chloe about. He intended to do that when he returned both books to her—with apologies for his behavior the night before. A call to the Medical Examiner’s Office this morning had informed Carella that Chadderton’s body had been picked up at the hospital at 8:00 A.M. for transfer to the funeral home on St. Sab’s. Presumably the body had by now been drained of its blood and the contents of its stomach, intestines, and bladder. Presumably, the mortician had already injected by trocar or tube a solution of formaldehyde that would cause coagulation of the body’s proteins. Presumably, the mortician had worked with wax and cosmetics to repair Chadderton’s shattered left cheekbone and disguise the gaping holes in his neck and the top of his skull. Carella wondered whether there would be an open coffin. Mourners usually chose to see their departed loved ones as sleeping peacefully; either that, or they chose not to view them at all.
The funeral director was a short, very dark black man who told Carella that the body would be ready for viewing at 2:00 P.M., in the Blue Chapel. He further informed Carella that Mrs. Chadderton had been there earlier today, to receive the body and to make all the arrangements, and had left at approximately 11:00 A.M. She had mentioned that she would not be back until 5:00. Carella thanked the man, and stepped outside into the pouring rain again. He went back in a moment later, and asked if he might use the telephone. The man showed him into an office opposite the Pink Chapel. In the Isola directory, Carella found a listing for George C. Chadderton at 1137 Raucher Street. He dialed the number and let it ring twelve times. There was no answer. He could not imagine that Chloe Chadderton had gone to work on the day following her husband’s murder, but he looked up the number of the Club Flamingo, dialed it, and spoke to a woman who identified herself as one of the bartenders. She told him that Chloe was expected at 12:00 noon. He thanked her, hung up, jotted the club’s address into his notebook, and then went outside to where he’d parked his car. He had forgotten to close the window on the driver’s side, which he’d partially opened earlier to keep the windshield from fogging. The seat was soaking wet when he climbed inside. Both plate-glass windows of the Club Flamingo were painted over pink. In the center of the window on the left was a huge hand-lettered sign advertising topless, bottomless, noon to 4:00 A.M. The club apparently offered more by way of spectacle than Chloe had revealed to him last night. “It’s a topless club,” she’d said, the difference between topless and bottomless being somewhat akin to that between Manslaughter and Murder One. In the other window was an equally large sign promising generous drinks, free lunch. Carella was hungry—he’d had only a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee for breakfast. He opened one of the two entrance doors and stepped into the club’s dim interior. Adjusting his eyes to the gloom, he stood just inside the entrance doors, listening to the canned rock music that blared from speakers all around the room. Dead ahead was a long oval bar. Two girls, one on either side of the bar, were gyrating in time to the rock music. Both girls were wearing sequined, high-heeled, ankle-strapped pumps and fringed G-strings. Both girls were bare-breasted. Neither of them wore anything under the G-strings. Neither of them was Chloe Chadderton.
He noticed now that there were small tables around the perimeter of the room. The place was not very crowded. He suspected the rain was keeping customers away. But at one of the tables, a blond girl danced—if one could call it that—for the exclusive pleasure of a man who sat there alone, nursing a beer. There were four men sitting at the bar, two on each side of it, three of them white, one of them black. Carella took a seat midway down the bar. One of the bartenders—a young redheaded girl wearing a black leotard and black net stockings—walked to where he was sitting, her high-heeled pumps clicking on the hard wooden floor.
“Something to drink, sir?” she said.
“Have you got anything soft?” Carella asked.
“Oh, yes indeed,” she said, and rolled her eyes and took in a deep breath, at once imparting sexual innuendo to his innocuous question. He looked at her. She figured she’d somehow made a mistake and immediately said, “Pepsi, Coke, Seven-Up, or ginger ale. It’ll cost you same as the whiskey, though.”
“How much is that?”
“Three-fifty. But that includes the lunch bar.”
“Coke or Pepsi, either one’s fine,” Carella said. “Has Chloe Chadderton come in yet?”
“She’s taking her break just now,” the redhead said, and then casually asked, “You a cop?”
“Yes,” Carella said, “I’m a cop.”
“Figures. Guy comes in here wanting an ice-cream soda, he’s got to be a cop on duty. What do you want with Chloe?”
“That’s between her and me, isn’t it?”
“This is a clean place, mister.”
“Nobody said it wasn’t.”
“Chloe dances same as the other girls. You won’t see nothing here you can’t see in any one of the legitimate theaters downtown. They got big stage shows downtown with nude dancers in them, same as here.”
“Mm-huh,” Carella said.
The redhead turned away, uncapped his soft drink, and poured it into a glass. “Nobody is allowed to touch the girls here. They just dance, period. Same as downtown. If it isn’t against the law in a legitimate theater, then it isn’t against the law here, either.”
“Relax,” Carella said. “I’m not looking for a bust.”
The girl rolled her eyes again. For a moment, he didn’t quite understand her reaction. And then he realized she was deliberately equating the police expression for “arrest”—a term he was certain she’d heard a hundred times before—with what was bursting exuberantly in the black leotard top. He looked at her again. She shrugged elaborately, turned away, and walked to the cash register at the end of the bar. One of the dancers was squatting before the solitary black customer now, her legs widespread, tossing aside the fringe of the G-string to reveal herself completely. The man stared at her exposed genitals. The girl smiled at him. She licked her lips. The man was wearing eyeglasses. The girl took the glasses from his eyes, and wiped them slowly over her opening, a mock expression of shocked propriety on her face. She returned the glasses to the man’s head, and then arched herself over backward, supporting herself with her arms, thrusting her open crotch toward his face, and pumping at him while he continued staring. Just like the legitimate theaters downtown, Carella thought.
