“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 girl friend’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 non-coms 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.”