The Empty Hours Read online

  The

  Empty Hours

  * * * *

  1

  They thought she was colored at first.

  The patrolman who investigated the complaint didn’t expect to find a dead woman. This was the first time he’d seen a corpse, and he was somewhat shaken by the ludicrously relaxed grotesqueness of the girl lying on her back on the rug, and his hand trembled a little as he made out his report. But when he came to the blank line calling for an identification of RACE, he unhesitatingly wrote “Negro.”

  The call had been taken at Headquarters by a patrolman in the central Complaint Bureau. He sat at a desk with a pad of printed forms before him, and he copied down the information, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, rolled the form and slipped it into a metal carrier, and then shot it by pneumatic tube to the radio room. A dispatcher there read the complaint form, shrugged because this seemed like a routine squeal, studied the precinct map on the wall opposite his desk, and then dispatched car eleven of the 87th Precinct to the scene.

  * * * *

  The girl was dead.

  She may have been a pretty girl, but she was hideous in death, distorted by the expanding gases inside her skin case. She was wearing a sweater and skirt, and she was barefoot, and her skirt had pulled back when she fell to the rug. Her head was twisted at a curious angle, the short black hair cradled by the rug, her eyes open and brown in a bloated face. The patrolman felt a sudden impulse to pull the girl’s skirt down over her knees. He knew, suddenly, she would have wanted this. Death had caught her in this indecent posture, robbing her of female instinct. There were things this girl would never do again, so many things, all of which must have seemed enormously important to the girl herself. But the single universal thing was an infinitesimal detail, magnified now by death: she would never again perform the simple feminine and somehow beautiful act of pulling her skirt down over her knees.

  The patrolman sighed and finished his report. The image of the dead girl remained in his mind all the way down to the squad car.

  * * * *

  It was hot in the squadroom on that night in early August. The men working the graveyard shift had reported for duty at 6:00 p.m., and they would not go home until eight the following morning. They were all detectives and perhaps privileged members of the police force, but there were many policemen — Detective Meyer Meyer among them — who maintained that a uniformed cop’s life made a hell of a lot more sense than a detective’s.

  “Sure, it does,” Meyer insisted now, sitting at his desk in his shirt sleeves. “A patrolman’s schedule provides regularity and security. It gives a man a home life.”

  “This squadroom is your home, Meyer,” Carella said. “Admit it.”

  “Sure,” Meyer answered, grinning. “I can’t wait to come to work each day.” He passed a hand over his bald pate. “You know what I like especially about this place? The interior decoration. The decor. It’s very restful.”

  “Oh, you don’t like your fellow workers, huh?” Carella said. He slid off the desk and winked at Cotton Hawes, who was standing at one of the filing cabinets. Then he walked toward the water cooler at the other end of the room, just inside the slatted railing that divided squadroom from corridor. He moved with a nonchalant ease that was deceptive. Steve Carella had never been one of those weight-lifting goons, and the image he presented was hardly one of bulging muscular power. But there was a quiet strength about the man and the way he moved, a confidence in the way he casually accepted the capabilities and limitations of his body. He stopped at the water cooler, filled a paper cup, and turned to look at Meyer again.

  “No, I like my colleagues,” Meyer said. “In fact, Steve, if I had my choice in all the world of who to work with, I would choose you honorable, decent guys. Sure.” Meyer nodded, building steam. “In fact, I’m thinking of having some medals cast off, so I can hand them out to you guys. Boy, am I lucky to have this job! I may come to work without pay from now on. I may just refuse my salary, this job is so enriching. I want to thank you guys. You make me recognize the real values in life.”

  “He makes a nice speech,” Hawes said.

  “He should run the line-up. It would break the monotony. How come you don’t run the line-up, Meyer?”

  “Steve, I been offered the job,” Meyer said seriously. “I told them I’m needed right here at the Eighty-seventh, the garden spot of all the precincts. Why, they offered me chief of detectives, and when I said no, they offered me commissioner, but I was loyal to the squad.”

  “Let’s give him a medal,” Hawes said, and the telephone rang.

  Meyer lifted the receiver. “Eighty-seventh Squad. Detective Meyer. What? Yeah, just a second.” He pulled a pad into place and began writing. “Yeah, I got it. Right. Right. Right. Okay.” He hung up. Carella had walked to his desk. “A little colored girl,” Meyer said.

  “Yeah?”

  “In a furnished room on South Eleventh.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dead,” Meyer said.

  * * * *

  2

  The city doesn’t seem to be itself in the very early hours of the morning.

  She is a woman, of course, and time will never change that. She awakes as a woman, tentatively touching the day in a yawning, smiling stretch, her lips free of color, her hair tousled, warm from sleep, her body richer, an innocent girlish quality about her as sunlight stains the eastern sky and covers her with early heat. She dresses in furnished rooms in crumby rundown slums, and she dresses in Hall Avenue penthouses, and in the countless apartments that crowd the buildings of Isola and Riverhead and Calm’s Point, in the private houses that line the streets of Bethtown and Majesta, and she emerges a different woman, sleek and businesslike, attractive but not sexy, a look of utter competence about her, manicured and polished, but with no time for nonsense, there is a long working day ahead of her. At five o’clock a metamorphosis takes place. She does not change her costume, this city, this woman, she wears the same frock or the same suit, the same high-heeled pumps or the same suburban loafers, but something breaks through that immaculate shell, a mood, a tone, an undercurrent. She is a different woman who sits in the bars and cocktail lounges, who relaxes on the patios or on the terraces shelving the skyscrapers, a different woman with a somewhat lazily inviting grin, a somewhat tired expression, an impenetrable knowledge on her face and in her eyes: she lifts her glass, she laughs gently, the evening sits expectantly on the skyline, the sky is awash with the purple of day’s end.

  She turns female in the night.

  She drops her femininity and turns female. The polish is gone, the mechanized competence; she becomes a little scatterbrained and a little cuddly; she crosses her legs recklessly and allows her lipstick to be kissed clear off her mouth, and she responds to the male hands on her body, and she turns soft and inviting and miraculously primitive. The night is a female time, and the city is nothing but a woman.

  And in the empty hours she sleeps, and she does not seem to be herself.

  In the morning she will awake again and touch the silent air in a yawn, spreading her arms, the contented smile on her naked mouth. Her hair will be mussed, we will know her, we have seen her this way often.

  But now she sleeps. She sleeps silently, this city. Oh, an eye open in the buildings of the night here and there, winking on, off again, silence. She rests. In sleep we do not recognize her. Her sleep is not like death, for we can hear and sense the murmur of life beneath the warm bedclothes. But she is a strange woman whom we have known intimately, loved passionately, and now she curls into an unresponsive ball beneath the sheets, and our hand is on her rich hip. We can feel life there, but we do not know her. She is faceless and featureless in the dark. She could be any city, any woman, anywhere. We touch her uncertainly. She has pulled the black nightgown of early morning around her, and we do not know her. She is a stranger, and her eyes are closed.

  The landlady was frightened by the presence of policemen, even though she had summoned them. The taller one, the one who called himself Detective Hawes, was a redheaded giant with a white streak in his hair, a horror if she’d ever seen one. The landlady stood in the apartment where the girl lay dead on the rug, and she talked to the detectives in whispers, not because she was in the presence of death, but only because it was three o’clock in the morning. The landlady was wearing a bathrobe over her gown. There was an intimacy to the scene, the same intimacy that hangs alike over an impending fishing trip or a completed tragedy. Three a.m. is a time for slumber, and those who are awake while the city sleeps share a common bond that makes them friendly aliens.

  “What’s the girl’s name?” Carella asked. It was three o’clock in the morning, and he had not shaved since 5 p.m. the day before, but his chin looked smooth. His eyes slanted slightly downward, combining with his clean-shaven face to give him a curiously oriental appearance. The landlady liked him. He was a nice boy, she thought. In her lexicon the men of the world were either “nice boys” or “louses.” She wasn’t sure about Cotton Hawes yet, but she imagined he was a parasitic insect.

  “Claudia Davis,” she answered, directing the answer to Carella whom she liked, and totally ignoring Hawes who had no right to be so big a man with a frightening white streak in his hair.

  “Do you know how old she was?” Carella asked.

  “Twenty-eight or twenty-nine, I think.”

  “Had she been living here long?”

  “Since June,” the landlady said.

  “That short a time, huh?”

&nb
sp; “And this has to happen,” the landlady said. “She seemed like such a nice girl. Who do you suppose did it?”

  “I don’t know,” Carella said.

  “Or do you think it was suicide? I don’t smell no gas, do you?”

  “No,” Carella said. “Do you know where she lived before this, Mrs. Mauder?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You didn’t ask for references when she took the apartment?”

  “It’s only a furnished room,” Mrs. Mauder said, shrugging. “She paid me a month’s rent in advance.”

  “How much was that, Mrs. Mauder?”

  “Sixty dollars. She paid it in cash. I never take checks from strangers.”

  “But you have no idea whether she’s from this city, or out of town, or whatever. Am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Davis,” Hawes said, shaking his head.

  “That’ll be a tough name to track down, Steve. Must be a thousand of them in the phone book.”

  “Why is your hair white?” the landlady asked.

  “Huh?”

  “That streak.”

  “Oh.” Hawes unconsciously touched his left temple. “I got knifed once,” he said, dismissing the question abruptly. “Mrs. Mauder, was the girl living alone?”

  “I don’t know. I mind my own business.”

  “Well, surely you would have seen…“

  “I think she was living alone. I don’t pry, and I don’t spy. She gave me a month’s rent in advance.”

  Hawes sighed. He could feel the woman’s hostility. He decided to leave the questioning to Carella. “I’ll take a look through the drawers and closets,” he said, and moved off without waiting for Carella’s answer.

  “It’s awfully hot in here,” Carella said.

  “The patrolman said we shouldn’t touch anything until you got here,” Mrs. Mauder said. “That’s why I didn’t open the windows or nothing.”

  “That was very thoughtful of you,” Carella said, smiling. “But I think we can open the window now, don’t you?”

  “If you like. It does smell in here. Is . . . is that her? Smelling?”

  “Yes,” Carella answered. He pulled open the window. “There. That’s a little better.”

  “Doesn’t help much,” the landlady said. “The weather’s been terrible — just terrible. Body can’t sleep at all.” She looked down at the dead girl. “She looks just awful, don’t she?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Mauder, would you know where she worked, or if she had a job?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “Anyone ever come by asking for her? Friends? Relatives?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I never saw any.”

  “Can you tell me anything about her habits? When she left the house in the morning? When she returned at night?”

  “I’m sorry; I never noticed.”

  “Well, what made you think something was wrong in here?”

  “The milk. Outside the door. I was out with some friends tonight, you see, and when I came back a man on the third floor called down to say his neighbor was playing the radio very loud and would I tell him to shut up, please. So I went upstairs and asked him to turn down the radio, and then I passed Miss Davis’ apartment and saw the milk standing outside the door, and I thought this was kind of funny in such hot weather, but I figured it was her milk, you know, and I don’t like to pry. So I came down and went to bed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that milk standing outside in the hallway. So I put on a robe and came upstairs and knocked on the door, and she didn’t answer. So I called out to her, and she still didn’t answer. So I figured something must be wrong. I don’t know why. I just figured . . . I don’t know. If she was in here, why didn’t she answer?”

  “How’d you know she was here?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Was the door locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “You tried it?”

  “Yes. It was locked.”

  “I see,” Carella said.

  “Couple of cars just pulled up downstairs,” Hawes said, walking over. “Probably the lab. And Homicide South.”

  “They know the squeal is ours,” Carella said. “Why do they bother?”

  “Make it look good,” Hawes said. “Homicide’s got the title on the door, so they figure they ought to go out and earn their salaries.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “A brand-new set of luggage in the closet, six pieces. The drawers and closets are full of clothes. Most of them look new. Lots of resort stuff, Steve. Found some brand-new books, too.”

  “What else?”

  “Some mail on the dresser top.”

  “Anything we can use?”

  Hawes shrugged. “A statement from the girl’s bank. Bunch of canceled checks. Might help us.”

  “Maybe,” Carella said. “Let’s see what the lab comes up with.”

  The laboratory report came the next day, together with a necropsy report from the assistant medical examiner. In combination, the reports were fairly valuable. The first thing the detectives learned was that the girl was a white Caucasian of approximately thirty years of age.

  Yes, white.

  The news came as something of a surprise to the cops because the girl lying on the rug had certainly looked like a Negress. After all, her skin was black. Not tan, not coffee-colored, not brown, but black — that intensely black coloration found on primitive tribes who spend a good deal of their time in the sun. The conclusion seemed to be a logical one, but death is a great equalizer not without a whimsical humor all its own, and the funniest kind of joke is a sight gag. Death changes white to black, and when that grisly old man comes marching in there’s no question of who’s going to school with whom. There’s no longer any question of pigmentation, friend. That girl on the floor looked black, but she was white, and whatever else she was she was also stone cold dead, and that’s the worst you can do to anybody.

  The report explained that the girl’s body was in a state of advanced putrefaction, and it went into such esoteric terms as “general distention of the body cavities, tissues, and blood vessels with gas,” and “black discoloration of the skin, mucous membranes, and irides caused by hemolysis and action of hydrogen sulfide on the blood pigment,” all of which broke down to the simple fact that it was a damn hot week in August and the girl had been lying on a rug which retained heat and speeded the postmortem putrefaction. From what they could tell, and in weather like this, it was mostly a guess, the girl had been dead and decomposing for at least forty-eight hours, which set the time of her demise as August first or thereabouts.

  One of the reports went on to say that the clothes she’d been wearing had been purchased in one of the city’s larger department stores. All of her clothes — those she wore and those found in her apartment — were rather expensive, but someone at the lab thought it necessary to note that all her panties were trimmed with Belgian lace and retailed for twenty-five dollars a pair. Someone else at the lab mentioned that a thorough examination of her garments and her body had revealed no traces of blood, semen, or oil stains.