“I’m not sending you, Genero, I’m asking if you’d like to go.”
“Send a patrolman,” Genero said. “What the hell is this? Every time there’s a shit job to be done on this squad, I’m the one who gets sent. Fuck that,” Genero said.
“I thought you might like some air,” Carella said.
“I’ve got cases to take care of here,” Genero said. “You think I’ve got nothing to do here?”
“Forget it,” Carella said.
“Send a goddamn patrolman.”
“I’ll send a patrolman,” Carella said.
“Anyway, it’s a gag, you think I don’t know it?” Genero said. “You’re making fun of that time I got shot in the park.”
“I thought you got shot in the foot.”
“In the foot in the park,” Genero said unsmilingly. Carella went back to his own desk and dialed 24 for the muster room downstairs. When Sergeant Murchison picked up, he said, “Dave, this is Steve. Can you send a car to the Headquarters Building for me? Eighth floor, ask for Detective Maloney, he’ll turn over a black Labrador retriever.”
“Is the dog vicious?” Murchison asked.
“No, he’s a seeing-eye dog, he’s not vicious.”
“There are some seeing-eye dogs will bite you soon as look at you,” Murchison said.
“In that case, tell your man to use a muzzle. They carry muzzles in the cars, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to get a muzzle on a vicious dog.”
“This dog isn’t vicious,” Carella said. “And, Dave, could you send somebody right away? If the dog isn’t picked up by ten, they’ll send him to the shelter and they’ll kill him iu three weeks.”
“So what’s the hurry?” Murchison said, and hung up.
Carella blinked. He put the receiver back on the cradle and looked at it. He looked at it so hard that it rang, startling him. He picked up the receiver again.
“87th Squad, Carella,” he said.
“Steve, this is Sam Grossman.”
“Hello, Sam, how are you?”
“Comme ci, comme ça,” Grossman said. “Was it you who sent this soil sample to the lab? It’s only marked ‘87th Squad.’ ”
“Meyer did. How does it look?”
“It matches what we got from under Harris’ fingernails, if that’s what you’re looking for. But I’ve got to tell you, Steve, this is a fairly common composition. I wouldn’t consider this a positive make unless you’ve got corroborating evidence.”
“Corroborating supposition, let’s say.”
“Okay, then.”
“Anything on the Harris apartment?”
“Nothing. No alien latents, footprints, hairs or fibers. Nothing.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll talk to you.”
“So long,” Grossman said, and hung up.
Carella put the receiver back on its cradle. An Army corporal was standing just outside the slatted rail divider, looking tentatively into the squadroom. Carella got up and walked to the divider. “Help you?” he said.
“Sergeant downstairs told me to come up here,” the corporal said. “I’m looking for somebody named Capella.”
“Carella, that’s me.”
“This is from Captain McCormick,” the corporal said, and handed Carella a maniia envelope printed in the left-hand comer with the words U.S. Army, Criminal Investigations Division.
“You’re here early,” Carella said.
“Actually, we got the packet yesterday, but there was nobody in the office. Mail room clocked it in at 4:07 p.m. Guys in St. Louis must’ve put it on a plane late Saturday night. That’s pretty good time, don’t you think?”
“That’s very good,” Carella said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t mention it,” the corporal said. “How do I get to Reuter Street? I’ve got to make a pickup on Reuter Street, the recruiting office there.”
“That’s all the way downtown,” Carella said. “Are you driving?”
“Yeah.”
“When you come out of the station house, make a right, and then another right at the next comer. That’s a one-way street heading north, it’ll take you straight to the River Highway. You want the westbound entrance. Take the highway downtown till you see the sign for Reuter.”
“Thanks,” the corporal said.
“Thank you,” Carella said, and gestured with the manila envelope.
“Don’t mention it,” the corporal said again, and did a smart about-face and went down the corridor.
Carella carried the envelope back to his desk and opened it. The sheaf of papers was thin but unfamiliar. It took him a while to get used to the forms themselves, and then another while to digest the information they contained. He made notes as he went along, not knowing whether the Xeroxed papers were his to keep and not wanting to mark them. McCormick had seemed specific about protocol on the telephone Friday. He guessed he would have to return the papers to the captain when he was through with them.
James Randolph Harris had entered the Army on the seventeenth day of May, ten years ago. He was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for his basic training, and from there to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for Advanced Infantry Training. At the end of August he was sent overseas as a Private First Class in D Company, 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry, 2nd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division. It did not say so in his field file, but Carella knew from the photograph they’d found in the Harris apartment that Jimmy had been in the 2nd Squad’s Alpha Fire Team.
If Carella recalled his own Army days correctly, there were four platoons in a company, and four squads in a platoon, which meant that in D Company there were sixteen squads altogether. Each platoon had a 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Squad, Army squads being labeled numerically rather than alphabetically. Since there were four platoons, there had to be four 2nd Squads. But there was nothing in the folder that gave the number of Jimmy’s platoon. Carella was assuming that if Jimmy had contacted an old Army buddy for assistance with a scheme, it would have been a man in his immediate combat team. But in order to zero in on Alpha, he had to know the number of the platoon.
The file dutifully reported that Jimmy had been wounded in action on the fourteenth day of December and then went on to describe the nature of the wound in strictly medical language. At the end of December he was transferred from the camp hospital to a hospital in Honolulu, and from there to another hospital in San Francisco, and finally to the General Hospital at Fort Mercer. His DD Form-214 showed that he had been honorably discharged with full disability pension in March. That was all.
Carella needed more.
Sighing, he opened his personal telephone directory, and leafed through the U’s till he came to the listing for U.S. Army. Under that he found the number he had called at Fort Jefferson the other day, and below that, the number for the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. He looked up at the wall clock. It was twenty after nine, which meant that it was only twenty after eight in St. Louis; there were sometimes drawbacks to living in a huge sprawling nation. He jotted the number onto a piece of scrap paper, and then took three D.D. report forms from his top desk drawer, separated them with two sheets of carbon, and began typing up his report on the interviews with Lloyd Baxter and Roxanne Hardy.
As he typed he wondered what Major Lemarre might have thought about Roxanne’s revelation. The major had seemed so certain that Jimmy was telling the truth about that basement rape twelve years ago. Instead, it hadn’t been a rape at all. Not a hundred-dollar gold-plated rape, nor even a two-bit tissue-paper rape. It had, instead, been a pair of teenage kids with the hots for each other, enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company against a basement post — listen, there were worse ways. The thing Carella didn’t understand was why Jimmy had lied. And why hadn’t the major caught the lie? Surely a trained psychiatrist should have been able to see through the false memory. There was no question but that Roxanne had told the truth about what happened that day; her retelling of the story had been too intense. But then again, so had Jimmy’s version — and it was Jimmy who’d been having the nightmares.