Long Time No See (21 page)

“I told you on the phone,” Hawes said. “James Harris was murdered.”

“So?”

“You were in his squad overseas, weren’t you?”

“Yes. I say again—so?”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“In August.”

“This past August?”

“Yes.”

“Where was that?”

“The company reunion in New Jersey.”

“What’d you talk about?”

“Old times.”

“How about
new
times?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he mention any plans he might have had?”

“Plans for what?”

“Plans involving Alpha.”

“What kind of plans?”

“You tell me,” Hawes said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did he mention needing Alpha’s help with anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Some kind of business deal, maybe?”

“I told you. Nothing.”

“Who else was there? From Alpha, I mean.”

“Just four of us.”

“Who?”

“Me and Jimmy, and Karl Fiersen who was on his way to Amsterdam, and Rudy Tanner who flew in from California.”

“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 First 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 girlfriend’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.

“I’d like to talk to Danny Cortez, please,” he said.

“Who’s this?” the woman asked, the accent unmistakable now.

“Detective Carella, 87th Squad in Isola.”

“
Who
?” the woman said.

“Police department,” he said.

“Police?
Que desea usted
?”

“I’d like to talk to Danny Cortez. Who’s this, please?”

“His wife.
Qual es su nombre
?”

“Carella. Detective Carella.”

“He knows you, my husband?”

“No. I’m calling long distance.”

“Ah, long distance,” she said. “One minute,
por favor
.”

Carella waited. He could hear voices in the background, talking softly in Spanish. Silence. Someone picked up the phone.

“Hello?” a man’s voice said.

“Mr. Cortez?”

“Yes?”

“This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad in Isola. I’m calling in reference to a murder we’re investigating.”

“A murder?”

“Yes. A man named James Harris. He was in the Army with you, would you happen to remember him?”

“Yes, sure. He was murdered, you say?”

“Yes. I was wondering if you’d answer some questions for me.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“When’s the last time you saw him, Mr. Cortez?”

“Jimmy? In August. We had a reunion of the company. I went there to New Jersey. That was when I saw him.”

“Did you talk to him then?”

“Oh, sure.”

“What about?”

“Oh, many things. We were in the same squad, you know. He was Alpha Fire Team, I was Bravo. We were the ones got them out the day he was wounded. They were trapped there, we got them out.”

“Were you very friendly with him?”

“Well, only so-so. We were in the same hootch, Alpha and Bravo, but—”

“The same
what
?”

“Hootch.”

“What’s that?”

“A hootch? You know what a hootch is.”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s what we lived in. On the base. There were eight of us in a hootch, the noncoms had their own Playboy pad.”

“Was it like a Quonset hut or something?”

“Well, it was more like a tent, you know, with wooden frames and the top half screened. Our hootch had a metal roof, but not all of them did.”

“And eight of you lived in this hootch, is that right?”

“Yeah, four of us from Alpha and four from Bravo. The sergeants—the two team leaders and the squad leader—had their own hootch. But what I’m saying is the guys in Alpha were closer to each other than they were to the guys in Bravo, even though we were all in the same squad. That’s because a fire team, you know, is a very tight-knit unit. You depend for your life on the guys in your own fire team, you understand me? You go through a lot together. Like Bravo went through a lot together, and Alpha went through a lot together, but on their
own
, you understand? Even though we were all in the same squad.”

“Mm-huh,” Carella said. “What did Alpha go through on its own?”

“Oh, lots of things. I mean, in combat and also off the base, you understand me?” His voice lowered. “In the bars, you know? And with whores, you know?”

“What did they go through in combat together?” Carella asked.

“Well, vill sweeps, you know. And on Ala Moana—that was a big operation—they were there when the lieutenant got killed.”

“Lieutenant Blake, would that be?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant Blake. The platoon commander.”

“Alpha was there but Bravo wasn’t, is that it?”

“Well, we were already going up the hill. There was a patrol out, and the RTO radioed back that they found half a dozen bunkers and a couple of tunnels up the hill. We were moving out to join them.”

“Bravo was?”

“Yeah. Alpha was resting.”

“Resting,” Carella said.

“Yeah. We’d all been through heavy fighting that whole month. Alpha was down where the lieutenant had set up a command post near some bamboo at the bottom of the hill.”

“A command post,” Carella said.

“Yeah. Well, not really a post. I mean, not buildings or tents or whatever. A command post is wherever the officer in command
is.
From where he directs the action, you understand me?”

“Mm-huh,” Carella said. “And that’s where the lieutenant was when he got killed? Down there with Alpha?”

“Yeah. Well, no, not exactly. This is what happened. Alpha was down there with the platoon sergeant—”

“Tataglia?”

“Yeah. Johnny Tataglia. Bravo was going up the hill to where the enemy was dug in. The lieutenant went back down to see where the hell Alpha was. To get Alpha so they could bring up the rear, you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“That’s when the mortar attack started. Bastards had zeroed in on the bamboo and were pounding the shit out of it.”

“And that’s when the lieutenant got killed?”

“Yeah, in the mortar attack. Frag must’ve got him. It was a terrible thing. Alpha took cover when the attack started, and then they couldn’t get to the lieutenant in time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, in the war over there, you had to pick up your own dead and wounded because if you didn’t they dragged them off and hacked them to pieces. The enemy, you understand me?”