“Yes.”
“You told him?”
“Jimmy did. He was talking about if anything should happen to him and Isabel, I’d be well taken care of. He had all to do to take care of hisself, but he was always worryin about me.” She looked directly into Carella’s eyes. “If you’re thinkin Charlie had anything to do with killing my boy and his wife, you’re dreaming, mister.”
“We’d like to talk to him, anyway,” Carella said.
“You can talk to him if you like, he lives right around the comer on Holman, 623 Holman. But it wasn’t Charlie who killed them. You ask me...”
“Yes, Mrs. Harris?”
“It must’ve been somebody crazy,” she said. “It had to be somebody crazy.”
Well, maybe it had been somebody crazy.
The city was full of bedbugs, true enough, and whereas they usually surfaced during the hot summer months, there was no law that said a lunatic couldn’t come out of the woodwork in the middle of November and kill two helpless blind people. The trouble with the crazies of the world, however, was exactly that: they were crazy. And with crazy people, you couldn’t go looking for reasons, you couldn’t start thinking about motives. With crazies, you just went along on the theory that maybe you’d stumble over a solution somehow, maybe the guy would go berserk in a crowded restaurant and you’d arrest him and he’d confess to having killed sixty-four blind people in the past month, all in different cities. One of them in London. There were a lot of crazies on television cop shows, the network reasoning being that the home viewer felt more content watching a show where a nut was doing all the killing, instead of a nice sane person with a motive, just like you or me. Crazies made very soothing killers. They were not much fun to track down, however, since there was no place to start and no place to go. All you could do was hope, and hope is the thing with feathers.
So they went to see Charlie Clarke, who at least had a possible reason for wanting Jimmy and Isabel Harris out of the way. In the land of the blind, and so on. And in the absence of any solid suspects, you grabbed for the nearest floating straw, hoping it would take on the dimensions of a lifeboat or a log.
The building on Holman was similar to the one in which Sophie lived. Lettered in white paint on successive risers of the front stoop were the warnings No Loitering and No Stoop Ball. They went into the outer lobby, where a row of broken mailboxes was on the walk to their left. There was a nameplate for Charles C. Clarke in the box for apartment 22. The upper half of the inner-lobby door was a piece of frosted glass that had a crack running diagonally across it from the lower left-hand comer to the upper right. The door was unlocked. The ground-floor landing stank of piss and wine. There were no lights. Carella turned on his flash, and together they climbed the steps.
“What do you suppose the C is for?” Meyer asked.
“What C?”
“Charles C. Clark,” Meyer said.
“Oh. Clarence?”
“My guess is Cyril.”
“No, either Clarence or Clyde.”
“Cyril,” Meyer said.
The light bulb on the second-floor landing had not been smashed or pilfered. Carella snapped out his flash. The metal numerals on Clarke’s door were painted the same brown color as the door itself. There were three visible keyways on the door; Charlie Clarke was no fool. There was also a metal bell twist just below the numbers. Carella took it between his thumb and forefinger, and gave it a twirl. The sound from within the apartment was sharp and jangling. He tried it again. He looked at Meyer, and was about to try it another time when a door at the end of the hall opened. A small boy looked out into the hallway. He was perhaps eight years old. He had brown skin and brown eyes, and he was letting his hair grow into an Afro. He was wearing bedroom slippers and a plaid bathrobe belted at the waist.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Carella said.
“You looking for Mr. Clarke?”
“Yes,” Carella said. “Do you know where he is?”
“At the gym. He’s got a price fighter, did you know that?”
“Name of Black Jackson,” Carella said.
“You did know, huh?”
“Yep.”
“What’s his middle name?” Meyer asked.
“Black Jackson’s? He ain’t got no middle name,” the boy said. “Black Jackson, that’s his name,” he said, and raised his fists in a boxer’s classic pose. “I got the flu,” he said. “I’m s’posed to be in bed.”
“You better get back there, then,” Meyer said. “Where’s the gym?”
“Up on Holman.”
“What’s Mr. Clarke’s middle name?”
“Don’t know,” the boy said, and grinned and closed the door.
They started down the steps again. On the first-floor landing, Carella turned on his flashlight again. A huge black woman wearing a green cardigan sweater over a flowered housedress was standing at the foot of the steps as they came down to the ground floor. Her hands were on her hips.
“What’s the heat, Officers?” she asked. They had not identified themselves, but she knew fuzz when she saw it.
“No heat,” Carella said.
“Who you lookin for, then?”
“None of your business, lady,” Meyer said. “Go back in your apartment, okay?”
“I’m the super in this building, I want to know what you two men are doing here.”
“We’re from Housing and Development,” Meyer said, “checking on whether they’re light bulbs on every landing. Go put in some light bulbs or we’ll be back with a warrant.”
“You ain’t from no Housing and Development,” the woman said. Meyer and Carella were already in the outer lobby. They did not know whether or not Charlie Clarke had done anything, but they did not want a telephone call warning him that the police were on the way. Behind them, they heard the super saying, “Housing and Development, sheeeee-it.”
Charlie Clarke was a dapper little man wearing a yellow turtleneck shirt and a tan cardigan sweater over it. Dark brown trousers. Brown patent-leather shoes. Cigar holder clamped in one corner of his mouth, dead cigar in it. They found him on the second floor of the gym on Holman and 78th, elbows on the ring-can-vas, watching a pair of black fighters sparring. One of the fighters was huge and flatfooted. The other was smaller but more agile. He kept dancing around the bigger fighter, hitting him with right jabs. All around the gym other fighters were skipping rope and pounding the big bags. In one comer a small pale man who looked like a welterweight kept a punching bag going with monotonously precise rhythm. Carella and Meyer walked over to the ring. Clarke had been described to them downstairs. The description proved to be entirely accurate, right down to the dead cigar in his mouth.
“Mr. Clarke?” Carella asked.
“Yeah, shh,” he said. "What the fuck you waitin on, man?” he shouted to the rink. The smaller, more agile fighter stopped dancing around the larger one, and dropped his hands in exasperation. The back of his sweatshirt was lettered with the name BLACK JACKSON. “You never gonna knock the man out, you keep jabbin all the time,” Clarke said. “You had plenty opportunity for the left hand, now what were you waitin on, man, would you tell me?”
“I was waitin on an opening,” Jackson said.
“Man, there was openings like a hooker’s Saturday night,” Clarke said.
“Ain’t no sense throwin the left till there’s an opening,” Jackson said.
“You want to be the heavyweight champ of the world, or you want to be a dance star?” Clarke asked. “All I see you doin is dancin and jabbin, dancin and jabbin. You want to knock down a man the size of Jody there, you got to hit him. man. You got to knock his fuckin head off, not go dancin with him.” He turned abruptly from the ring and said, “What is it, Officers?”