Ghosts

“I don’t know what the hell to think. Maybe Craig thought it was just a friendly little visit, have a drink, make yourself comfortable, and out comes the knife.”

“It’s the knife that bothers me,” Hawes said. “The fact that he brought the knife with him.”

“Sure, that makes it premeditated.”

“Murder One, pure and simple.”

“Then why’d he accept a drink first?”

“And what did they talk about between five o’clock and whenever it was he began hacking away?”

The detectives looked at each other again.

“Esposito?” Hawes asked.

“Maybe,” Carella said. “He lived in the building, he could have presented himself as the member of some tenants’ committee or…”

“Then who was it downstairs?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who a

“No,” Carella said. “Shit, let’s go talk to the Fire Department.”

At Engine Company Number Six, a half hour later, they spoke to Terry Brogan, the moonlighting bartender. Brogan looked at the photograph of Warren Esposito, nodded, and said, “Yeah, I know him.”

“Was he in Elmer’s Thursday night?” Carella asked.

“What was Thursday? The twenty-second?”

“The twenty-first.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was working the bar that night.”

“Did Esposito come in?”

“Is that his name?”

“Warren Esposito, yes. Did he…?”

“Serve a guy drinks for months on end, never get to know his name,” Brogan said, and shook his head wonderingly.

“Was he there Thursday night?”

“Thursday night, Thursday night,” Brogan said, “let me see, what happened Thursday night?” He was thoughtful for several moments. From the second floor of the firehouse, spilling down through the hole surrounding the brass pole, Carella heard a voice saying, “Full boat, kings over.” Someone else said, “You’ve got a fuckin’ horseshoe up your ass.”

“I think Thursday was the night the redhead took off her blouse,” Brogan said.

“When was that? What time?”

“Musta been about six o’clock,” Brogan said. “She came in bombed, and she had three more drinks in an hour. Yeah, it musta been about six. What it was, some guy sitting at the bar said she had to be wearing falsies, tits like that. So she took off her blouse to show him she wasn’t.”

“Was Esposito there?” Carella said patiently.

“He coulda been. With all that excitement…I mean, who was looking anyplace but the redhead’s chest?”

“What time did you start work last Thursday?” Hawes said, figuring he’d come in by the side door.

“Four-thirty.”

“Esposito told us he was there at five-thirty.”

“He coulda been.”

“What time did the redhead come in?”

“An hour before she took off her blouse.”

“That would’ve been five o’clock, right?”

“Yeah, about five.”

“Okay, were you the only one tending bar at five o’clock?”

“Sure.”

“So you were serving the redhead.”

“Right.”

“So between five and six there was no excitement. Nothing to distract you. So can you try to remember whether or not Warren Esposito came in at five-thirty?”

“Look at the picture again,” Carella said.

Brogan looked at the picture again. Carella found himself wondering how the man would behave in a four-alarm fire. What would happen if he hacked his way into a blazing bedroom and found a bare-breasted redhead in there? Would he forget his own name? Would he jump to the street six stories below without a net under him? Would he turn his hose on an open window?

“Yeah, that’s right,” Brogan said.

“What’s right?” Carella asked, wondering if he’d stumbled across another psychic.

“Rob Roys. He drinks Rob Roys. Right. I served the redhead a Manhattan, and then the old fart up the bar a gin on the rocks, and then he came in and ordered a Rob Roy.”

“Esposito?”

“Yeah, the guy in the picture here.”

“What time?”

“Well, if the redhead came in at five…Yeah, it musta been five-thirty or thereabouts. Like he said.”

“What time did he leave?” Carella asked.

“That’s hard to say,” Brogan said. “Because of all the excitement with the redhead.”

“Was he there when the redhead took off her blouse?”

“I’m pretty sure he was. Let me think a minute.”

Carella watched him while he thought a minute. Carella imagined he was reconstructing the entire exciting event in his mind. In all his years of police work he had never known an alibi to hinge on a redhead’s breasts. But the redhead had come in at 5:00 and taken off her blouse at 6:00, and they had just established that Esposito was there at about 5:30. If Carella had wanted to pull teeth for a living, he would’ve become a dentist. It seemed, though, that they would have to work Brogan’s mouth from bicuspid to molar to canine, tooth by tooth, till they got what they were after.

Brogan began counting off imaginary people lined up along the bar, using the forefinger of his left hand. “Abner at the end of the bar, near the juke, scotch and soda. The secretary from Halston, Inc., next to him, vodka tonic. Then your guy here, Rob Roy. Next to him a guy I never saw before, bourbon and water. Then the redhead, Manhattans. And next to her the guy who made the comment about her tits, also who I never saw before, Canadian and soda. So that’s who was there at six o’clock, just before she took off the blouse. So, yeah, your guy was still there at six.”

“How do you know it was six?” Hawes asked.

“The news was just coming on. On television. We have a television set over the bar. That’s what started the whole thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“This girl they got doing the six o’clock news. What’s her name? I forget her name.”

“I don’t know her name,” Hawes said.

“But you know who I mean, don’t you? Her and this guy do the news together. The six o’clock news.”

“Well, what about her?” Hawes said.

“Somebody said she had great tits—the girl on television—and the redhead said they were falsies, and the guy sitting next to the redhead said something about hers being falsies, too, and that was when she took off her blouse to prove they weren’t.” Brogan gri

“So Esposito was there at six o’clock when the news came on and the blouse came off,” Carella said.

“Right.”

“Was he still there at six-thirty?”

“Six-thirty, six-thirty,” Brogan said. “Let me think a minute.”

Carella looked at Hawes. Hawes let out his breath through his nose.

“The boss came in about ten minutes after six,” Brogan said. “He sees the redhead sitting there at the bar starkers from the waist up, he says, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ He thinks she’s a hooker or something, you know? He tells her to get the hell out of there, he don’t want hookers lining up at his bar, bringing heat down on the place. Just between us, he collects numbers on the side. So, naturally, he don’t want some cop coming in there to bust a hooker and accidentally tumbling to the numbers operation.” His voice lowered confidentially. “I’m telling you this because we’re all civil service employees,” he said. “I don’t want to cause the guy no trouble.”

“All right, so the boss came in at six-ten,” Hawes said. “Was Esposito there when the boss came in?”

“Yeah, he joined in the chorus.”

“What chorus?”

“Everybody told the boss to shut up and leave the redhead alone.”

“Then what?”

“The boss told her to put on her blouse and get out of there before he called the police. He wasn’t really going to call no police because then he might get the kind of trouble he wasn’t looking for; he was just kind of threatening her, you know?”

“Did she put on the blouse?” Carella asked.

“She put on the blouse.”

“At ten minutes after six?”

“At a quarter after six.”

“Then what?”

“She left. No, wait. First she called the boss a tight-assed son of a bitch. Then she left.”