Ghosts

So on Christmas night, at 8:00, Carella arrived at Mercy Hospital to tell Meyer how guilty he was feeling about not having got shot in Meyer’s place. Meyer was feeling guilty himself. It was Meyer’s contention that if he hadn’t been stupid enough to have got himself shot, then Bob O’Brien wouldn’t have been forced into the position of once again having to draw his gun and fire it. Meyer was worried about what this might do to O’Brien’s own feelings of guilt, even though O’Brien was Irish and consequently less prone.

Carella had brought a pint of whiskey with him. He took it out of his coat pocket, poured a pair of generous shots into two sterile hospital glasses, and together the men drank to the undeniable fact that Meyer was still alive albeit a bit punctured. Carella poured a second pair of drinks, and the men drank to another day dawning tomorrow.

7

The new Lineup Room, or Showup Room as it was alternately called, was in the basement of the station house, adjacent to the holding cells where booked prisoners were kept temporarily, awaiting transportation to the Criminal Courts Building downtown. This provided easy access to live bodies who—if they or their attorneys had no objections—could be paraded before a victim or a witness in the company of the true suspect the police hoped would be identified.

In days of yore, a lineup of all felony offenders arrested the previous day would be held downtown at Headquarters every morning. The purpose of that bygone lineup was to acquaint detectives from all over the city with the people who were committing crimes here. Detectives attended lineups as often as they attended court. But whereas court appearances were necessary if convictions were to be had, somebody upstairs decided that the daily lineups were a drain on manpower and resulted in a minimum amount of future arrests since the people on the stage were headed for confinement anyway, some of them for life. The lineup was now a strictly local affair and conducted solely for the purpose of identification.

The Lineup Room contained a narrow stage with height markers on the wall behind it and a hanging microphone above it. In front of the stage, and separating the stage from three rows of auditorium seats, was a floor-to-ceiling one-way mirror. The one-way mirror was sometimes called a two-way mirror by cops, but cops rarely agreed on anything except whose day off it was. One-way or two-way, it presented to the people lined up on the stage behind it only their own reflections. On the other side, the people sitting in the auditorium seats could look through what appeared to be a plate-glass window for an unobstructed, unobserved view of the men or women lined up beyond.

The lineup that Tuesday morning, December 26, was being held for the express purpose of eliciting from Jerry Mandel a positive identification of Daniel Corbett. Carella had called Mandel at home first thing in the morning and was delighted to learn that the Harborview security guard had returned from his skiing trip without any broken bones. He had set up a time for the lineup and then had called Corbett first at home and then at Harlow House to ask if he would cooperate with the police in this matter. Corbett said he had nothing to hide—he had definitely not been the man who’d a

From the holding cells next door, the detectives had selected half a dozen men roughly resembling Corbett—all of them with black hair and brown eyes. From the squadroom upstairs, they recruited Detectives Richard Genero and Jerry Barker, similarly hued. The prisoners, all wearing what they’d had on when arrested, presented a sartorial mix of sweaters, sports jackets, and—in the case of one gentleman pickpocket—a dapper pin-striped suit. Genero and Barker were wearing sports jackets. Daniel Corbett, who’d come to the precinct directly from Harlow House, was wearing a dark blue suit, a paler blue shirt, and a gold-and-blue silk rep tie. As the guest of honor he was allowed to choose his own position in the line. He elected to take the position fourth from the left. When all nine men had silently taken their places behind the one-way mirror, the spotlights went on over the stage. The auditorium beyond remained dark. Carella and Hawes were sitting together with Mandel in the second row center, flanking him.

“Recognize anybody?” Carella said.

“No, not yet,” Mandel said. He was, surprisingly for a skier, a chubby little man in his mid-fifties. He had told Carella, before the lineup, that he used to be a professional wrestler. Carella could not possibly imagine him throwing a hammerlock on anyone. Mandel kept staring at the men behind the plate glass.

“Can I eliminate the ones it definitely wasn’t?” he asked.

“Go right ahead.”

“Well, it wasn’t the ones on either end there, and it wasn’t the one in the middle.”

“Frank,” Carella said into the microphone on the stand before him, “you can take away Numbers One, Five, and Nine.” Genero was standing first in line; he slouched off the stage, looking oddly disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen the wi

“Could they say something for me?” Mandel whispered.

“Sure,” Carella said. “Gentlemen, would you mind saying in your normal voices, ‘I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.’ Number Four, we’ll start with you.”

Number Four was Daniel Corbett. He cleared his throat and said, “I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.”

“All right, Number Six,” Carella said.

Number Six said, “I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.”

“And Number Eight.”

Number Eight said, “I’m Daniel Corbett. I’d like to see Mr. Craig, please.”

“What do you think?” Carella asked.

“I can’t be certain…” Mandel said, and paused, “but I think it’s the one on the right. Number Eight.”

Number Eight was a man named Anthony Ruggiero, who had been arrested early that morning for attempting to break down the door of an apartment just off Grover Avenue, three blocks from the police station. He was drunk at the time, and he claimed he thought it was his own apartment and that the woman who kept telling him to go away was his wife. Carella looked at Hawes, briefly and bleakly, and then thanked Mandel. He went behind the one-way mirror a moment later, like a stage-door Joh

“So who the hell was it?” Carella asked Hawes.

“Somebody Craig knew, that’s for sure.”

“Had to be. Otherwise, why would he have let him into the apartment? And why would he have had a drink with him?”

“That’s right, the autopsy…”

“Right, he’d been drinking. In fact, he was drunk. But the lab techs couldn’t find alcohol traces in any of the glasses.”

“Which means they were washed afterwards.”

“Which doesn’t mean a thing if Craig was drinking alone. But Hillary told me he never drank while he was working. Never. We know he was working that afternoon because there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. And the sentence just trailed off, which makes it reasonable to believe he was interrupted—probably when the killer rang the doorbell. But he let him in, Cotton! He knew it wasn’t Corbett, and he let him in anyway. And if he never drank while he was working, then he had to have started drinking after he quit working. Which means he sat down to have a drink with the man who murdered him.”

The two detectives looked at each other.

“What do you think?” Hawes asked.