Ghosts

“What about the paper?” one of them asked. “Who’ll take care of the paper?”

“I will,” Carella said.

“So then maybe we get in a jam,” the second patrolman said.

“If you want to file, go ahead and file,” Carella said.

“As what? A 10-24?”

“That’s what it was.”

“Where do we say it was?”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy tried to stab her outside the subway on Masters. But she didn’t call us till she got back here. So what do we put down as the scene?”

“Here,” Carella said. “This is where you responded, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but this ain’t where it happened.”

“So let me file, okay?” Carella said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You ain’t got a sergeant like we got,” the first patrolman said.

“Look, I want to talk to the victim,” Carella said. “I told you this is a homicide we’re working, so how about letting me file, and then you won’t have to worry about it.”

“Get his name and shield number,” the second patrolman advised.

“Detective/Second Grade Stephen Louis Carella,” Carella said patiently, “87th Squad. My shield number is 714-5632.”

“You got that?” the second patrolman asked his partner.

“I got it,” the first patrolman said, and they both left the apartment, still concerned about what their sergeant might say.

Denise Scott was in a state of numbed shock. Her face was pale, her lips were trembling, she had not taken off her coat—as if somehow it still afforded her protection against the assailant’s knife. Hillary brought her a whopping snifter of brandy, and when she had taken several swallows of it and the color had returned to her cheeks, she seemed ready to talk about what had happened. What had happened was really quite simple. Someone had grabbed her from behind as she was starting down the steps to the subway station, pulled her over backward, and then slashed at the front of her coat with the biggest damn knife she’d ever seen in her life. She’d hit out at him with her bag, and she’d begun screaming, and the man had turned and begun ru

“It was a man, you’re sure of that?” Carella said.

“Positive.”

“What did he look like?” Hawes asked.

“Black hair and brown eyes. A very narrow face,” Denise said.

“How old?”

“Late twenties, I’d say.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“In a minute.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Not a word. He just pulled me around and tried to stab me. Look what he did to my coat and blouse,” she said, and eased the torn blouse aside to study the sloping top of her left breast. Hawes seemed very interested in whether or not the knife had penetrated her flesh. He stared at the V opening of her blouse with all the scrutiny of an assistant medical examiner. “I was just lucky, that’s all,” Denise said, and let the blouse fall back into place.

“He was after me,” Hillary said.

Carella did not ask her why she thought so; he was thinking exactly the same thing.

“Let me have the coat,” she said.

“What?” her sister said.

“Your coat. Let me have it.”

Denise took off the coat. The knife thrust had torn the blouse over her left breast. Beneath the gaping satiny slash, Hawes could glimpse a promise of Denise’s flesh, a milkier white against the off-white of the satin. Hillary held the black coat against her own breasts like a phantom lover. Closing her eyes, she began to sway the way she had after she’d kissed Carella. Hawes looked at her and then looked at her sister and decided he would rather go to bed with Denise than with Hillary. Then he decided the exact opposite. Then he decided both of them wouldn’t be bad together, at the same time, in the king-sized bed in his apartment. Carella, not being psychic, didn’t know that everybody in the world had threesomes in mind this holiday season. Hillary, claiming to be what Carella knew he wasn’t, began intoning in a voice reminiscent of the one she’d used after she’d kissed him, “Tape, you stole, tape,” the same old routine.

Befuddled, Hawes watched her; he had never caught her act before. Denise, used to the ways of mediums, yawned. The brandy was reaching her. She seemed to have forgotten that less than an hour ago someone had tried to dispatch her to that great beyond her sister was now presumably tapping—Hillary had said it was a ghost who’d killed Gregory Craig, and now the same ghost had tried to kill her sister, and her black overcoat was giving off emanations that seemed to indicate either something or nothing at all.

“Hemp,” she said.

Carella wasn’t sure whether or not she was clearing her throat.

“Hemp,” she said again. “Stay.”

He hadn’t pla

“Hemp, stay,” she said. “Hempstead. Hampstead.”

Carella distinctively felt the hair on the back of his neck bristling. Hawes, watching Denise—who now crossed her legs recklessly and gri

“Mass,” Hillary intoned, her eyes still closed, her body swaying, the black overcoat clutched in her hands. “Mass. Massachusetts. Hampstead, Massachusetts,” and Carella’s mouth dropped open.

Hillary opened her eyes and stared blankly at him. His own stare was equally blank. Like a pair of blind idiot savants sharing the same mysterious knowledge, they stared at each other across an abyss no wider than three feet, but writhing with whispering demons and restless corpses. His feet were suddenly cold. He stared at her unblinkingly, and she stared back, and he could swear her eyes were on fire, the deep brown lighted from within with all the reds and yellows of glittering opals.

“Someone drowned in Hampstead, Massachusetts,” she said.

She said this directly to him, ignoring Hawes and her sister. And Carella, knowing full well that she had lived with Craig for the past year and more, knowing, too, that he might have told her all about the drowning of his former wife two miles from where he was renting the haunted house he made famous in Deadly Shades, nonetheless believed that the knowledge had come to her from the black overcoat she held in her hands.

When she said, “We’ll go to Massachusetts, you and I,” he knew that they would because Craig’s wife had drowned up there three summers ago, and now three more people were dead, and another murder attempt had been made—and maybe there were ghosts involved after all.

They had hoped to get there by one in the afternoon, a not unrealistic estimate in that they left the city at a little after 10:00 and Hampstead—by the map—was no more than 200 miles to the northeast. The roads outside the city were bone-dry; the storm that had blanketed Isola had left the surrounding areas untouched. It was only when they entered Massachusetts that they encountered difficulty. Whereas earlier Carella had maintained a steady fifty-five miles an hour in keeping with the federal energy-saving speed limit, he now eased off on the accelerator and hoped he would average thirty. Snow was not the problem; any state hoping for skiers during the winter months made certain the roads were plowed and scraped the instant the first snowflake fell. But the temperature had dropped to eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the roadside snow that had been melting during the midmorning hours had now frozen into a thin slick that covered the asphalt from median divider to shoulder and made driving treacherous and exhausting.

They reached Hampstead at 2:25 that afternoon. The sky was overcast, and a harsh wind blew in over the ocean, rattling the wooden shutters on the seaside buildings. The town seemed to have crawled up out of the Atlantic like some prehistoric thing seeking the sun, finding instead a rocky, inhospitable coastline and collapsing upon it in disappointment and exhaustion. The ramshackle buildings on the waterfront were uniformly gray, their weather-beaten shingles evoking a time when Hampstead was a small fishing village and men went down to the sea in ships. There were still nets and lobster pots in evidence, but the inevitable crush of progress had threaded through the town a gaudy string of motels and fast-food joints that thoroughly blighted what could not have been a particularly cheerful place to begin with.